Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  The next day, while he was standing on the ramshackle jetty with the native idlers, Calcott saw a sight which revived the melodramatic question acutely. He saw one of Wright’s crew, one of the men who had returned with Silva. He was standing in his boat and he was wearing over his cotton trousers a pair of mosquito boots. The man was very near and Calcott at once was convinced he had seen the boots before.

  Calcott went up the wide street, climbing to his house. He was striving to remember where he had seen such a pair of boots before. He was wondering how a half-naked boatman could have come to own them. He remembered when he got to his house and saw the case of whisky. Wright had had such a pair of boots. Calcott remembered coveting them too.

  He saw the man again that day. He was lounging against a wall in the street talking to this friends. A theory startled Calcott’s suspicious mind in which the remains of the spirit’s story still flickered. Wright had been murdered for his boots! It was just the kind of crime the ‘dagoes’ would commit.

  Calcott sat in his room and read again the letters from Johnson and Phillips. Very clearly, they said, that Wright had died accidentally. If this was so, the boots must have been given to the man after his death. Calcott saw Silva and he thought, in spite of the letters—this chap knows more than he tells. Why did he come back alone? He said to Silva:

  ‘Have they sent back everything that belonged to Mr Wright?’

  Silva replied that to the best of his knowledge they had. He was a little proud of having had charge of Wright’s few possessions, a watch, a compass, a notebook and a box of clothes and books.

  ‘Who did they give his boots to?’

  ‘No one,’ Silva said. ‘They buried him in his boots.’

  ‘What, they didn’t give them away?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re a liar, Silver,’ said Calcott.

  Silva was never disconcerted by Calcott’s insults. He regarded them as one of the eccentricities of the English, they even gratified him. A foreign language has always an air of fantasy.

  ‘No, it’s true,’ said Silva. ‘Because the men wanted his boots; but I explained that with the English it would be impossible.’

  ‘Well, they’ve got them,’ Calcott said. ‘There’s a man in this town wearing them. Come on, you know it. How did they get them? You came back with them.’

  Even Calcott, in the drama of his suspicions, saw that Silva’s surprise was genuine.

  ‘They must have dug them up,’ he said, ‘before we left.’

  Silva thought this was a disagreeable action, but he could not bring himself to take a horrified view of it. Robbery, murder, bribery, all crimes were not uncommon on the river. As an admirer of the English, he himself took the view that all men were brothers. As a Portuguese, he knew that brotherhood was one thing, property another.

  But Calcott was shocked. He was shocked by the thing itself and shocked by the resigned shrug of Silva’s shoulders. An Englishman’s boots had been taken, a dead Englishman’s boots—Calcott rose up with indignation. There was more in this than met the eye. With Silva he searched the town until he found the man and asked him how he came by the boots.

  ‘They were not given to you,’ Silva said.

  ‘They were,’ the man said. A heated argument and explanation began in the street. The man denied that he had taken them from the grave.

  Silva listened to the argument, the protests. His face had the innocence of a young girl asleep, half-smiling at a dream she is making.

  The death of Wright, the mysteriousness of the circumstances of the death and the apparent robbery which had accompanied it, acted like an exploding mine under the stronghold of Calcott’s Englishness. There was a breach in that stronghold where Wright had been and through the gap streamed the insectile swarm of Calcott’s buried fears of the country. He had no defences. He feared more than anything else that he might die away from England. He had seen many Englishmen die.

  Moreover Calcott had admired Wright’s boots.

  On this day Calcott’s state was one of patriotic property hysteria. It conveyed him to the police. They recalled some doubt about the permits for the Englishmen’s guns and ammunition, and the list of the possible crimes of the Englishmen grew in number. Awakening to action, the police arrested Silva and the crew, then paused to see what next they should do. Pausing, they relapsed once more into torpor and sleep and the flies walked on the shining barrels of their guns.

  Book Four

  Chapter Thirteen

  In the first three days Johnson and Phillips were changed. The strangeness, the pain, the sweat and struggle, the boredom and the uncertainty of what the next hour held, the fear of what might lie in the water of the river or be waiting in the trees, the weight of the sun, the blank, dead blue-board of sky so dense in blueness and yet so vacant—all the burden of those days was no longer distributed upon several men with unlimited time before them, but was now loaded upon two. The moment they departed from their companions, they felt this unmistakeable increase of the load. The weight of the light increased upon the eyes, the weight of the green upon the mind, the weight of the heat upon the skin. The country, dispersed before among them, became concentrated, its aspect intensified. Neither Phillips nor Johnson spoke on their first morning alone. When, very early, they passed the creek where he and Wright had gone, Johnson did not look up. He had chosen the opposite bank.

  The vision becomes adjusted to smaller fields, life to more exact ends. Phillips wrote in his diary:

  ‘River gone to pot. Spread out into a marsh of puddles and pools and bushes. Sometimes only five feet wide like a sewage ditch or a watercress bed. Awful smells. Everything rotting and the scum drying on the trunks. I paddle and J. stands up in the bows with a pole.’

  He was thinking of those old, unused lanes in England which have become an almost impenetrable tangle of nettle, thistle and thorn between the overgrown trees, where the sodden earth smells sour. England going back to jungle after war. You hated war because killing was futile and frightening; yet here you brought the fantasies of your war-time childhood. You dug trenches, built pontoons, took part in imaginary skirmishes. There were many more moments like the one on the launch, when at the sight of the cover of the trees you took that imaginary pot-shot at the mulatto and saw him tumble in the water. Why this trudging, interior stress on the desire to kill?

  Immersed in the thicket of the river wilderness, the sky often shut out for long periods when the water became a ditch tunnel, tricked up false channels and barred by some fallen trunk which fell not alone, but dragging a mass of wiry liana and lesser trees with it, like a girder bringing down the roof of a bombed factory—‘bombed’ was Phillips’ word—and so forced to return often upon their tracks they did not think of the surrounding jungle.

  ‘The banks of the river have closed. We are pushing into the hot mess of reed and bush and birds go up crying.’ As if there were a violation of the land.

  ‘Sweat on Johnson. Skin goes red rather than brown. Swollen. Mosquitoes get at the inside of your nostrils, your ears and your eyelids.’

  When they rested they sat scratching like the Indians.

  The bloody fool to be standing up there half-naked, with his red ears sticking out. His shoulder blades worked smoothly under his skin. But it’s too red. His skin is too damned red. This red, stocky sweaty man who smells too sweet. Lucy’s lover.

  His thoughts went over to England again. Lucy’s words when they came out of her lips always seemed to stroke the air with the soft summer hum. The hairs above her upper lip were like the fine black hairs of a big bee.

  Then he was back at their departure. The limbs of the river-banks were closing.

  ‘My mother used to belong to a very advanced set of people when she was young. I’ve just been thinking they can’t have been as advanced as she thought,’ said Johnson out of space from the bows of the boat.

  He was in England too. Phillips smiled.

  ‘What is “advanced”?’


  A huge, pink winged bird like a heron was flying over the river.

  Phillips did not speak as loudly as Johnson. This was partly from fear of being heard in the trees and partly because he felt everything they said would be ridiculous in this place. A cheerful, public school amateur like Johnson could not see that only Indians were not grotesque in this country. Stupid hero.

  Supposing one morning, like this morning, they discovered the fate of Johnson’s father? Supposing there was a pocket-book, a boot, something metal which lasts, a gun or a watch! What happens? Does he vanish from his invisible leadership? If he is to lead us, if we are to believe in him and if he is to have power over our lives, is it not necessary that he should elude us for ever and be unknown?

  Johnson did not often think about Phillips. He was not aware of the body and of the mind of the man behind him, did not know that Phillips’ thoughts were so often passing like invisible fingers over his back or settling there like touchless flies. In the evening they had the luck to find rock where there was no mud and the flies were few when they camped.

  They put their fire low. It was a delight to cook a speared fish which had caused such laughter and swearing in the spearing. A speared fish, Johnson explained, meant a cartridge saved.

  Climbing a high tree before dark they could see no smoke of Indian fires.

  ‘You’re all right tonight,’ Harry said.

  This relieved Phillips, but Johnson was disappointed. Without the help of Indians, whom he intended to approach whatever might come of it, they could hardly leave the river and find their way.

  Nevertheless they did leave the river.

  Phillips’ Diary: ‘Fifth day on our own. No Indians. Left boat and now lugging everything. It weighs a ton. Cutting our way and torn to bits. Have gone lame. H. says this is the crucial bit. A sort of porterage without canoe to the Rio Negro—every bloody river seems to be called Rio Negro—reckon it can’t be more than fifty miles. Then we’re right on the track. I’ll be glad to see a river, to let a boat carry this pack. Feel like a Woolworths. Thought snakes and tigers would be the trouble in this country but it’s a poisoned toe and an incapacity to digest tough (so-called) partridge.’

  Sometimes the country was open, the bush and dry vegetation scratching the sky. It grew out of the mud in the marsh places and water holes like the fibre of a grass broom. Drop a match and the dry scrub would have gone up in flames like hay. The place was glazed and still like a photograph and with hardly more colour. Trees stood up like English trees but casting a dry, savage, uncooling shade; and gaudy fowl, like clockwork in their noise, went out of them. Lizards rippled away at every step, the jewelled and the leaf-coloured, and small deer sometimes in these wrecked brakes, stared with naive curiosity too long. Once or twice in these days Johnson made a shot so easy that even hungry and anxious men, thinking always miles and days ahead, paused to smile in admiration before they fired and the smile died.

  There was a strange joy in feeling that this country was filled and alive and continuously breeding with hot, fearful, hungry animals like themselves, walking in a thin, fine line of ecstacy between life and death, preying upon each other, though-dulled, sun-choked, bruised and torn by the insuring earth.

  He did not know how to say it but it seemed to Johnson that no disturbing questions should be asked. But Phillips, ever nervous, restless, his brain and nerves like the taut strings of an instrument responding to every sight and then plunged by exhaustion into melancholy and a quiet maddened boredom, would not leave his thoughts alone. In the silence at midday when there was no sound whatever but the breathing of their tired-out bodies, hidden memories of his childhood, fantasies of his early life came up from the savagery in himself. Johnson listened if Phillips broke their habit of not talking seriously, but said little, revealed nothing. Sometimes he was going to speak; his words rose, simmered and sank back.

  What he would have wished to say if it had not been confusion in his mind was that he had passed through the soft horror of Lucy, the hard speechless horror of Wright’s death to the elaborate and voluptuous reliefs of living alone and the belief that in discovering his father all was expiated, defined and justified. He did not think these things. They poured like reflections of earthly things over the head and body of one who is swimming under water.

  On the march, if it could be called a march and not a slow tottering of two loaded, top-heavy figures with heads rarely looking up to more than a few yards ahead of them, they were together in consultation about landmarks and the compass and when they were held by the undergrowth which was thrown out like the coils of wire of an enemy’s entablements. They had to take out their long Brazilian knives and cut their way through. But they walked apart for hours at a stretch, slow hours, slow-moving men, like two ants crawling through grass, moving by instinct from one edge or pool of shade to the next. And when the bush was low and there was no shade for head and body but they must take the huge clasp of the sunlight, hugging them like some fiery golden ape and dragging their heads and shoulders down, they moved into those inches of shade made by tufts of grass, to get their blistered feet into that fugitive coolness. They leaned upright against trees to rest, for it was a labour to get to their feet again under their loads.

  Johnson was in front. He turned his head only if he saw difficulty. There was a grin of patience in his beard. They laughed quietly at their ludicrous appearance. They were used to the sight of each other, had no words. Their talk was reduced to single words. And those words soon lost their original meanings and new, ridiculous ones or abbreviations were used. These were more expressive of their situation than the words of ordinary speech, implied under the comedy a trust, a faith in each other, the bond of a shared history. Water was called mud. Farinha was called sawdust and became abbreviated to ‘dust.’ The tough, stringy game was extravagantly called peacock at first but soon became ‘peek,’ ‘pekinese’ and finally ‘dog’ when being eaten. The compass was ‘the jigger.’ So ‘take a jig’ was to take bearings. Climbing a tree to reconnoitre was turned into ‘comb the place for lice.’ Quinine, though never taken, was called gin. Shooting a bird was ‘balling up a hen’ and was reduced to ‘balling.’ Phillips made malicious reference to Johnson’s Greenland adventures by saying ‘What about balling one of the dogs.’ Enquiries about personal health became obscene. Phillips’ diary was his ‘toilet roll.’

  These words, and dozens more, became their only language, covered the essentials of living. They became the language of their trust, their understanding and their bond. Less and less they spoke and the words became shorter; their completest trust was in silence. True, they joked hungrily about restaurants and amused themselves by making imaginary menus; anything more serious they avoided. Normal speech, would have been alien and rich in betrayal. To suggest their normal world would have insinuated doubts, angers and irritations, would have made them separate. When they were together hacking their way, they merely swore.

  But the silence between them, that is to say, the faith, was not perfect. In the end there is no unity between people, there is a final, inevitable preservation of the individual. Phillips’ faith was more emotional and more vocal. He saw the figure ahead, the drooping back, the broad shoulders, the gleam of the gun-barrel, the dirty white handkerchief concealing the neck, and when he was nearer, the handkerchief blowing back in the occasional breeze and exposing the boils. The bearded face, though he was used to it now, when turned to him, was strange. It was a mask. It was symbolical of the new Johnson, the man of sickness, guilt, obsession, fanatical energy and unexplained decision whose motives were buried, whose existence he had not suspected. With the beard Johnson looked old, cunning, wily, a dirty slogging dwarf on some self-chosen treadmill. His teeth when they showed between the lips looked like the teeth of a dirty gorilla. This was when his face was turned: but most of the day Phillips saw only his back.

  Then Phillips’ mind was softer and happier, trusting and loving. Yes, loving. All the attra
ction he had had to Harry in England bloomed in Phillips’ heart into a deep love. Sometimes with jealousy he joined with Johnson against Lucy, who had so vehemently robbed him. He saw her again and again on the stairs of Mrs Johnson’s house, her eyes brilliant in their dark shadows, her skin too white, her lips too set, calling Harry to her room on his last night in England, and Harry, frowning and hesitant, not wishing to come. She had seemed then in this final moment of her possession of Harry, as she stood in the dim bad light of the landing shadows, like the negress he and Harry had seen when they were coming up the river. Just before Harry was sick.

  Then he changed sides and joined with Lucy because he had loved her too and had been joined to her, bathed in her as if he were pressed into the unguent of a lily, and had felt thereafter that they walked into each other’s minds like happy people who came smiling into a familiar room and can stay there awhile perfectly at ease, alert with curious interest, and he felt then again what he had felt in the launch at the beginning of the journey, a kind of pity and tolerance of Johnson. He, Phillips, was there to care for Johnson and bring him back to Lucy. In this excited state—and often in the midst of worn-out misery it would come to him, not to stay long, but to flutter across his mind like a relieving breeze—he felt the strength of loving Johnson, a passionate devotion to the man who was trudging ahead. ‘He’s hard. He’s tough. That man never tires.’ And Johnson went ahead untroubled, with monotonous unhesitating regular pace, like an ox yoked to his object. Phillips was glad that he and Johnson, alone and sharing the intense burden of this world removed from all other worlds, were bound to the same woman. There came to him in these moments the desire to tell Johnson this.

  But these moments, though not rare, began to lose their relevance. The only important question was, would the two of them survive?