‘You can go back,’ said Johnson. ‘We’ve marked the trail. I’m not going back.’
Phillips crawled away. He dreaded that he would break into tears before Johnson. He came back after a long absence and when he had sat down he asked in a calmer voice:
‘We ought to know where we stand.’
‘I’m going to the river.’
‘And if you can’t get there?’
‘I can get there.’
‘Well, I can’t,’ said Phillips.
‘We can go our ways. You go back. I go on,’ Johnson said.
There it was, said openly. He wanted to be alone.
Thirst was round their throats squeezing like a closing hand. A throbbing was at the roots of their tongues, rhythmic and to each distinct, and quietly it spoke under all their thoughts and words, like the bubbles of a spring breaking into the bed of a pool, saying, ‘Water. Water. Water.’ As yet it was only the throbbing, consistent but quiet. Against this the counter-assertions were made: water tomorrow. Water tomorrow. Dew in the morning. Lick the dew in the morning. Awake early before the sun blisters it off.
No quiet speculation by the dry, splitting flames, but assertion against the companion: I’ve got my pain. Why do you obtrude yours? Can’t carry yours. A bound man can’t undo another’s bonds.
‘You go back. I go on?’ Phillips repeated, struggling with his horror.
‘Yes.’
Here was the limit of Phillips’ endurance, the freezing summit of his fear.
‘Oh no,’ he said quietly.
‘Why not?’
I shan’t let you,’ Phillips said.
‘You’re not going to do it twice,’ Phillips said.
‘What twice?’
‘Like you did with Wright.’
Johnson turned speechlessly to Phillips as if he were going to strike him. His first was clenched. He said quietly:
‘That was dirty, Gilbert.’
‘So it may be,’ said Phillips, with what vehemence his torn throat allowed. ‘But I didn’t come up here to die. You did desert Wright. You wanted to on the river. I don’t say it was your fault he died but, remember, some people will. Some people do already. . .’
‘Who?’ said Johnson quietly as Phillips’ manner became more bitter and excited.
‘Silva for one,’ said Phillips, getting breath. ‘You told a lot of things to Silva.’ Phillips’ jealousy came to its head. ‘Well, Silva told a lot of things to me and he’ll be down at Calcott’s now telling Calcott.’
Now Johnson was stirred. The old dread of scandal returned.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Just that you murdered Charles because his wife was going to have your child.’
‘Good God!’ Johnson said and gaped at Phillips.
‘You don’t believe that?’ Johnson said.
‘No,’ said Phillips. ‘Of course I don’t.’
‘Silva’s saying that!’ said Johnson.
‘He’s saying it all right.’
Phillips’ outburst had taken him to things he had not thought of saying. The buried resentments came up, the hidden jealousies. His tortured voice was sneering and venomous.
Johnson listened in amazement both to the news Phillips gave him and the bitterness with which it was delivered. But if Phillips had started with the belief that what he said would, in some mysterious way of the will, make Johnson return or would punish him for wishing to be alone, he was wrong. Johnson hated rows and they always occurred in expeditions. The only thing was to be alone. Quite alone, in this country where his father had been alone.
Phillips lay back exhausted by his outburst. He lay back and hid his face from the light of the fire, thrust it into the darkness. He was ashamed.
He was ashamed because he had shown that he was afraid. He was ashamed because he knew he would not have the courage to go back alone and because he was so dependent upon Harry. To be level with Harry and his equal—this yearning of their journey together—was shown to be impossible. He would be cut off not only from Harry but from courage.
But there was a way in which he was the equal of Harry. There was a thing which made them equals. It was a secret way but now it must be openly and desperately avowed. He was not the equal of Harry in courage, but he was the equal in love. Lucy’s voice came to him as he lay there, begging him not to speak, repeating her words, ‘I’m afraid of hurting him. Look after him for me,’ but Phillips drove them back. Harry had got to be hurt. Every stab of pain must be paid for. He must be brought to his senses by the shock of pain and since physical pain seemed to leave him untouched, it must be pain in the soul. He must be shown that they were not separate but one. He must be made to know the bond.
The malice, aggression and other motives of the frankly selfish kind which may have been in Gilbert’s determination were married to more creditable convictions. He knew something of Harry’s love affair and he knew that Harry’s behaviour in it had had, under his reluctance, some element of the perverse. Harry had made Lucy suffer, he had made Wright suffer, he was now making himself (Gilbert) suffer. He was cheerfully distributing among others, without knowing it, some surplus of his own self-torture. This would have seemed morally indefensible to Gilbert in any case; but now, since he loved Harry, his heart was passionately concerned for him. The weakness of Phillips was that he thought it sufficient to show people the self-destructiveness of their ways by awakening their reason and that this would cure them. His absurdity and his intolerance sprang from the delusion that he was disinterested. In his egoism he completely ignored the instincts of people, the predatory nucleus which is the basis of human life. He really wished to annihilate with his reason, though he would have been horrified to hear that this was so. The truth he did not see was that he wished to save Harry because he had become the rival of Lucy for possession of him.
Now that he had decided to speak there remained only the difficulty of speaking. The stamping heart had to be quietened, the trembling lips to be steadied. The blood throbbed in his ears when at last he said, gravely:
‘Harry, I want to speak to you about Lucy.’
Harry did not answer. He was lying propped on his pack looking at the fire.
‘We’ve got a duty to her, Harry,’ Gilbert said. He stumbled on since Harry still did not reply: ‘Not only you, but I have. Both of us. I think that is important. I think it’s more important than finding out about your father.’
Harry turned his head towards Gilbert.
‘I’m not going back,’ Harry said stubbornly.
‘It isn’t that,’ Gilbert said. ‘You’re not going back now. All right. But you’re going back next leave. Or she’ll be coming out here.’
‘Here?’ said Harry.
‘Yes, here.’
‘I’m not going back,’ Harry said.
Their voices weakened, strained by thirst. ‘I’m never going back.’
He turned to Phillips and repeated:
‘My father went here. He stayed here. He lived here for seventeen years.’
Phillips sat up and stared in horror.
‘You’re mad, Harry,’ he said. ‘He’s not here. You know that. And you know you’ll never find him. And that you can’t stay here.’
The madness of the intention so horrified that it left Phillips incredulous. He fought it off, brushed it aside.
‘Lucy loves you,’ Gilbert said. ‘You can’t treat her like that. She loved me and I loved her. I still do love her. I don’t mean it is the same as you and she.’
In a stone-dead voice Harry said:
‘It’s all over now. I was alone before and I was happy. Suppose,’ he suddenly turned to Gilbert, ‘suppose she’s having a child?’
‘She’s not having a child.’
‘How do you know?’ said Johnson. ‘She may be having one.’
‘That’s what Silva’s saying,’ Phillips said. ‘Did you tell him that?’
Harry got up without answering and began putting sticks on the fire.
Phillip’s fear of a high fire at night which could bring the Indians distracted him.
‘Leave it alone,’ he pleaded. Did Johnson want to have them both killed?
‘There’s no need to be afraid of Indians,’ Harry said. He sat down again at last.
‘You think she’s going to have a child and yet you stay out here. You just leave her to it?’
But, of course, there was no answer Johnson could give to such questions. He lived—didn’t Gilbert understand?—in the shadow of the death of Wright, a greater crime had swallowed up the lesser. The first crime he knew with his reason to have been a fantasy, it was part of that unexplained litter of experience that one drags about after one. Some day one will see it clearly; some day one will understand it. Not yet, but some day. But the death of Wright was no fantasy. He had seen the man die and he knew why he had died, and he thought he read on his face in death the inscrutable expression of the betrayed man. And there was also the frightening, thrilling, overwhelming knowledge that because this man was dead you were set free. And the inevitable reaction to that freedom was to choose some path of expiation and make freedom arduous. Johnson answered honestly:
‘I don’t think she is having a child now, but I thought she did not write me because she was going to have one. I was worried by that.’
‘I would have been proud to have Lucy’s child,’ Phillips said. ‘She is lovely and warm and she’s got a lot of sense. There is a touch of something savage in her—like you, Harry’—Phillips smiled—‘but she’s clever enough to hide it. You only know a woman when you sleep with her.’
It was for Harry now to look out from the shadow of the death of Wright upon his life with Lucy and with Gilbert; and doing so, he recognised how much he and Lucy had depended upon Gilbert’s goodwill, and how, at first, when he was repelled by Lucy he had often thought: ‘I am a fool, because Gilbert likes her and she likes Gilbert.’ It was the capacity for quiet intimate friendship among people which Harry most respected. He loved the sanity of friendship even while, alone, he was drawn by the element of insanity and obsession in his passions.
It was Lucy, sane and generaous, who had shown him his insanity and had set about dissolving it in herself; and Gilbert confirmed what her instincts essayed.
And yet, under the shadow of the death of Wright, something in Johnson rose fanatically to keep this view of the past at a distance. He spoke now as one who is describing experiences which are mere reminiscence and beyond the reach of present action. He was committed to the necessity of finding the father.
Harry said without jealousy, without any espionage of mind and heart, but simply:
‘When I came back to England I thought you and Lucy were in love. I had never thought of loving Lucy because I’d known her so long. She said she was fond of you. She said once she was always half in love with you. I said to her once, “Have you ever had an affair with Gilbert? It would never surprise me.” And it wouldn’t have done. I couldn’t quite believe it when she said “No.” You seemed to understand each other.’
It may have been Lucy’s denial, the affront of that; it may have been that jealousy which seems to bring love to the brink so that it may swell over and declare itself. But the occasion, at least, was clear; it was to show Harry that he could not be alone, to keep him there at his side in the bush where the trees were made of fear and every sound plucked with cruel and delicate fingers at the heart, to kill the implications of the words ‘Never come back,’ that Gilbert said:
‘I have slept with Lucy. I’ve always wanted to tell you. Of course it was before you and there as nothing between us, nothing like you and she. We understood each other too well.’
An effusion to tenderness was in his face, a boastful candour. He turned eagerly to Johnson with beating heart, ringing with happiness, and underneath: ‘He cannot be alone. He cannot be alone.’
But Johnson’s face was startled. His mouth had opened. His eyes were small and staring. A small stick was in his hand. He was banging it on the ground, banging and banging, till it snapped in two. Then he threw one piece after the other into the fire and watched them burn. Phillips was checked. He felt suddenly foolish, abysmally silly. And mean. The stupidity and meanness! His soul shrivelled.
‘I thought she must have told you,’ he lied.
He went on hurriedly to explain about Lucy and himself, in a panic to heal his own wound, horrified, cursing himself for having spoken. Johnson listened without speech. He picked up sticks beside him, snapped them and threw them into the fire, reaching out for more.
‘She told me a lie,’ he said, in a voice of unsurpassed bitterness and looked, stiff-lipped, small-mouthed at Phillips, looking at his head, then his neck, his chest and slowly down his stretched-out body.
Phillips was lost and helpless. He saw Johnson get up and—odd gesture in their filthy state—brush the earth from his clothes. He went out into the ring of jumping firelight and, pulling out his knife, cut at the thicket. For half an hour he worked thereabouts. There was the sound of his knife on the branches, the drag of the broken ones as he pulled them out. A mania for collecting fuel possessed him. He slashed and cut with method and energy, absorbed in his task. The heap grew higher and further afield he went and dragged in more. Phillips saw his working arms, his bending body, the fire shine on his knife and on his sweating face. At last he began to bear his load nearer to the fire and Phillips. Startled out of his horror at Johnson’s alienation and distance, the sudden aloneness which had come upon him, making them more than ever apart instead of uniting them as Phillips had absurdly hoped, he rose up to help. They laboured silently at the pile and speech dried in Phillips’ throat; he waited for a word to release him. But not until all was carried and Johnson had heaved a great pile on to the fire, which crackled and sent up a soft speckled brush of sparks into the sky, did Johnson speak.
‘That’ll bring them,’ he said.
The expected release was choked back by these words. Phillips looked appalled at the flame and its flight of sparks. It was feet higher than the invisible line of safety he had drawn. He lay down under his beating heart and Johnson took that watch. Phillips watched him and the fire, listening to the noises of the bush, and time passed. It passed and slowly his horror sank into him and became part of his life, new wheels of anxiety to work in with the other familiar wheels. His horror was assimilated. Another burden. He grew used to it. And now there was renewed in him the pain which the conversation had silenced for a time: the tightening hand round the throat, the sore throbbing at the root of the tongue, the underlying speech of the body: ‘Water. Water. Give me water. Rise very early and lick the dew from the leaves.’
In the morning they travelled miles from each other. Near at night, they were already like ships, still in view of each other, the wisp of smoke on the horizon, but going wider and wider apart.
The day before they had drunk poor water, a thick muddy liquid which coated the inside of the mouth and the teeth and increased their thirst. At their last camp they had camped high and there had been none. They had half-emptied their bottles in the morning when they had made coffee. Now their mouths were dry with thirst. They were silenced. Johnson frowned at the bush.
In the afternoon their way lay under the shade of trees. How long can a man live without water? They licked their drying lips, sucked stones. There was little fruit in the trees.
Their thirst of the morning became a fire burning in the throat and closing it. The shade so cool and silent which a breeze freshened, the ground gentle, the trees full of sap—and yet no water. Their throats were choking. Johnson’s eyes grew wide and staring under his frown.
Of course they had known that this might happen. Every day they had said, ‘Lucky.’ Yet—in the midst of trees and vegetation, with other animals living among them—thirst had seemed impossible. Now it came to them suddenly, gearing them to an inexplicable tyranny. From their ribs to their necks they were caught in its passion. They stopped often to listen for the sound
of water; like thirsting animals they began to smell the air. They looked to the earth for spoor leading to some spring.
The marched until the day closed and camped clear of the trees. Soon the flame went up like splitting spires at the dry sky. At night when they lit their fire they hoped and feared that Indians would see it. Johnson kept the fire high in his watch but Phillips let it die. His nerves were on the edge as the flame leapt higher; he came to measure a height of flame which he thought was safe. He winced and bit his lips when Johnson raked in a pile of broken stick and re-charged the fire.
‘It’s all right,’ Phillips said. This persistent quarrel about the fire!
This was their second waterless camp and the fact silenced them, arrested all their thoughts, shocked them.
How had it come about that there was no water? Was it a mile away, ten miles away? Where was it? They looked beyond their camp. The sky and the land had suddenly become a wall against them, a glazed impervious surface.
They averted their faces from each other, ate in silence, stood up, went about in the ring of the fire’s glow alone. If they happened to approach each other they halted, made a pretence of picking up wood and passed without a word.
A small dark cloud went over the sky and they looked up at it, each unaware of the other.
‘Cocktail,’ said Phillips.
This, they both thought in different ways, is the beginning of it. Of what? Of saving the white thing called your body.
But as the afternoon closed and the calls of the evening insects shrilled and grated like cheap tin instruments, and flies came out, and the blisters and thorn tears began to sting, the river floated out of their minds. A well, a spring, a mud hole was now urgent to them. They spoke of it. Phillips insisted that they stop and explore for water alone. His mind had become narrowed to this point of purpose. It had become the only thing.
And Johnson obeyed him.
The whole condition of their journey had changed. Route, objective, Indians, alertness to danger, even the river went. Johnson no longer led, Phillips no longer followed, there was no father. There was no leader because gradually there had been borne in upon them the futility of going anywhere, or of being anything. Thirst was the leader.
Dead Man Leading Page 19