On the launch a man buckled and went over the boat side into the water. For a few seconds there was the same ecstasy of horror. Phillips lowered the gun and leaned forward with his mouth open in hunger for the blood. Then he trembled with panic; for Johnson did not fall but turned round and looked in Phillips’ direction and in time to see the gun raised at him.
Their faces were not clearly visible to each other. Neither knew what was passing in the other’s heart.
Harry took a step or two towards Phillips and called. The sound was not clear. Phillips did not answer the call and did not signal. Awakened by the shame of the failure of his shot, He lowered his head and walked away to the shadow of the rock out of Johnson’s sight.
The firing of a gun had once been an arranged call between them. At three hundred yards’ distance Johnson watched the figure of the other man. Was the shot a signal? A signal at that small distance? No, it was not a signal. Johnson’s alert face relaxed in to the stupor of understanding the meaning of the shot. The gun had become an enemy. He stood still daring Phillips to fire again; derisive of the miss. Thirst-maddened, he had thought before that Phillips had wanted the gun to kill him; Johnson waited longer to see what would happen after Phillips disappeared behind the rock. The air and the trees were alive with the scrambling, chuckling nervous noises of the disturbed birds in their flocks. He glanced at them as he waited for Phillips to appear again. The trees were electric with wings.
He had left Phillips the gun. They could not say he had left the man without the means of defence; rather, he (Johnson) had stripped himself of defence. When he was with men his guilt was there—the illusion of seeing Charles Wright in the cave—but, alone, his luck came back. On his own, suffering cut deeper with self-infliction, and reward was greater. On his own, he would find water. On his own, his luck would return like merriness to his eyes, and he could do anything. Let Phillips come out from the rock and fire again and see that Johnson was impervious when alone.
But as Phillips did not come out again, a sullen depression and sorrow overcame Johnson. He felt the enmity of Phillips with wonder and, in his tortured brain, there were the vestiges of their common pity for each other. Johnson slowly turned his back upon the unlucky rock and the shamed man, instinctively not wishing to see his shame, and went forward to the water. Water, if there was any, might be on this side or on the other, but he went forward, forward and forward and the knife in his weak hand hacked with listless habit at the bushes and the trees to mark the way back.
When one imagines the hour before death it seems to be a time when the mind will ask, ‘Why have I come here to this place to die? If I had known yesterday I would have eluded death by taking a journey to another place. I would have altered the events of my life, taking different turnings this time from the ones I took, and so I would have changed everything. A different course would have a different end.’ One imagines dreaming the ancient platitudes: ‘Why now?’ and ‘Can’t I go back to settle this matter?’ and so running a hand over the events of one’s life with a pity for the creature who led it. But there may not be time or calm or consciousness. There may be no sad, luxurious survey and no meditative wooing of the end.
Phillips went back to the shadow of the rock to die. But he raved. Reminiscence became chaotic delirium. He muttered and shouted as his hands clawed at the rock. No orderly stream of pleading memory came back, but his mind rushed back to childhood as if he had been caught up in a burning ball and hurled there. His spirit shrivelled to the dimensions of a child’s small frenzy of life and his clawing hands were upon his mother’s breast, his lips parted to drink.
While he was lying there and Johnson got further and further away, the noise of the birds and the insects became furious and all the heavy-lobed leaves of the trees were loud with them. The macaws shouted and then the clockwork bawlings of parrot, toucan and cockatoo. In sudden silences these birds would take flight in numbers from one tree to another and start their din in a new place, while far beyond the place where Phillips was lying dense flocks went up and whirled around in indolent kite tails a quarter of a mile long. The insects matched the birds with shriller, more metallic sounds, bell-ringings and twangings, and the whole wild orchestra seemed to be working itself up to a climax which was not reached even when the sun went down.
Then, before sundown, nearly all the sound ceased and forest and scrub were held in an overwhelming silence. Here and there some great grasshopper hacked away, but he was an isolated worker, a mere stone in the depths of silence. The stillness stared and if a small bird now got up in flight it seemed to send a shadow over the breadth of the country. The warm air was thick and without movement except when, now and then, a noiseless and heavy wave seemed to pass through it like the breathing of a man, asleep, and when it had passed it did not relieve the burden of the air but rather added to it.
On this evening the sun was hidden before it went down. A line of dark cloud had appeared as suddenly as black heads of marching men over the horizon and then came in sultry battalions to meet the sun. Its last rays struck out for one last, lucid minute on the edge of the mass, and when they went many great trees in the scrub stood out, hard and particular, against the cloud. Presently the farther fields of the silence were frayed away by a murmur like the sound of the sea, the murmur grew into a far-off seething which came forward in invisible leaps and breeze shot out ahead of it, turning up the startling undersides of the leaves. And on the heels of the small breezes came the force of the wind, full, warm and powerful.
Restraint broke. A howl came out of the air and the trees bent over. They seemed to run before the wind, bowed double and streaming. The leaves flew flat and the branches ran out under them, and in the half-darkness of the cloud the leaves were no longer green, but grey. For tens of miles the forest leaned to the storm, the tall palms blowing like feathers in a hat and the whole scene like the flight of a mob.
Lightning had been twitching on the horizon but now the first fork split nearly overhead and the first peal went off. The flash and peal again, like beaten pans, the bush flaring, until the rain fell. It throbbed in blood-warm drops at first and then was hung suddenly in the sky like a solid curtain, billowing, blowing, and the dust and steam from the hot oil smoked at once where the rain swept, so that soon the clear sight of everything was wiped out.
Phillips had crawled to the doorway of a house of many pillars and balconies and there, a little man only a few inches high, in top hat and without coat or umbrella, he sank on the short flight of steps and clamoured to be taken in. This was his dream when the storm awoke his drenched body. He thought he must have died and that all the fables of hell had become true. He got to his knees. With a cry he opened his burning throat to the rain, he crawled to a corner of the rock which had become a gutter where the water streamed and he drank. He was down on his knees, his face pressed against the rock to catch the sand-reddened water. And from the rock he turned this way and that in a mad attempt not to lose any drop that fell around him. He coveted the water that dripped out of his hair on to his cheeks, that drenched his clothes and ran down his back. He gasped and talked aloud, calling out names to the water, and he laughed at it. Exhausted as he was by his frantic efforts to drink he could feel the first shivers of renewal to his life.
And as a little of his life came back he dragged the pans of his equipment out and with trembling hands set them to catch more of the water. They flashed in a way that terrified him when the lightning lit them with its methylated flame, but he groped among them panting and saying, ‘Stay there! That’s it! Fill up!’ He laughed at them as though they were dogs or children he was training. He himself was crawling on his hands and knees like a dog.
Slowly, as life revived, he remembered his situation. He pulled his equipment and then the gun towards him and fell back dizzily against the rock in some inches of shelter. He began to sing and shout with joy. He crawled out and drank some water out of one of the pans and sank back again. Old fears came with t
he new life and he huddled in terror of the storm; and, when he had mastered or endured this, there was fear of the night which had come. And he feared for Harry. For how many hours had gone by, or even, how many days?
He searched for their torch and lit it. The rain did not slacken; it was a shining, hissing wall in the torchlight and lightning. He was soaked and swamped by it. The gutter stream had become a foaming waterfall. There was no shelter where he was. He was crouching in a river.
‘There is always something to do. Before you need to fear there is always something to do.’ If Harry was not there, there were Harry’s words.
‘The cave!’ he cried.
The cave. How to get to the cave, save the equipment and get to the cave. What strength and mind he had became concentrated on these objects. His pride rose with the tempest. And then the long struggle began. The rain beat him back to the rock, mud and lumps of earth were breaking from the higher ledges now and the whole world—the small world in the small circle of his light—had become a vertical flow, a wall with no hand-grip. He searched with the light for a small ledge of shelter from the cascade and saw such an eave a few yards from him.
One was driven back flattened, breathless, between a wall of rain and a wall of rock, but he fought for it. The pans he left, but he dragged the equipment with him to the ledge. Again the flash of light upon a scene which had dissolved into spouts and waterfalls. They broke in beards and plumes from ledge after ledge in the light of the torch and down came the gravel and stone with them, flying out as if a man were hurling them from the top of the rock. He took the light away from a phantasmagoria so unnerving and kept it to the next step, for it seemed as impossible to live among those spouts ahead as under the fall of a Niagara.
Time passed in this scheming, fearing and reckoning but he had no knowledge of time. He was shifting his load, groping his way, sheltering where he could.
In the darkness he did not know that he was going the long way round to the cave and that, had he taken the opposite direction round the rock, he would have found it only a few yards away.
The peals rolled their war away to the horizon, leaving the rain windless. Lost in the rock face, bruised and drenched, he thought that the cave must have been another of Johnson’s delusions. But the lightning in its retreat signalled the cave at last. It was high in the rock, a large hole half the height of a man with water spouting out on either side of it. He climbed up digging his hands into the mud on the boulders.
It was long before he discovered the size of the place. The rock roof was low inside and the depth at first seemed little, the air was warmer than it had been outside. He sat down and the water poured from him. He was too exhausted to explore. While the struggle was on he had had strength and nerve for anything, but soon he found that the awakening to life was an awakening to misery. The rain made the intolerable whine of machines on a factory floor.
The expedition had taught Phillips many things. It had taught him always to be active. The torchlight was strong though it had only one or two hours’ life in it, and, careful not to examine the cave yet and so start fears rising, he concentrated on the little circle near him, and unstrapped the equipment he found his sodden matches and laid them out on the dry floor. He rang out his clothes and then put them on again. His mouth and tongue and lips were aching and he could not easily swallow, but he took some of the sodden meal which had become like wet dough in the sack and tried to eat it. It made him sick. Having resigned oneself to a torturing death once, one is not going to give it another chance without a struggle.
He started to talk to himself as he crawled about his muddle in the floor of the cave. He was with quiet feverishness making a world for himself which had no past and no future. The thoughts: ‘I shall get pneumonia because I cannot dry my clothes and shall have to wait until sunrise to dry them,’ or ‘What is Harry doing in this? Supposing he doesn’t come back tonight?’ were pushed away by a search for the rest of the food, for a brandy-flask which did not exist and the hundred little gropings among his muddle. And all the time he was thinking, ‘Fire. How can I get fire? I was burned nearly to death a few hours ago and now I can’t get a light anywhere.’ He began to murmur to himself, ‘Give us a light. Give us a light.’
‘Give us a light, someone,’ he said aloud.
He flashed the light round the cave.
‘Give us a light!’ he shouted.
His voice filled the cave and there was a small and remote echo after it. He knew it was an echo but he called:
‘Who’s there? Come out and give us a light.’
The far corner of the cave was not closed and, when he crouched to look, he saw there was a rift which led to another compartment in the rock, very lofty at the opening. The flash of his light brought the bats down from the roof. It all so vividly recalled going to the pasteboard river caves of the Crystal Palace when he was a boy and all the ‘horrid caverns’ of the mountains of romantic literature, moments of tense reading of Scott and Shelley by the kitchen fire, that his fears had almost a comforting familiarity.
‘Bloody homely,’ he said. And ‘homely,’ chattered the echoes.
Weakly he started to sing hymns and like some famished gospel meeting the echoes chanted. He came out from the cavern to the hiss of the rain in the outer hole with a gratitude for the dreary company he had. They never failed his voice.
He was determined upon fire, to dry the things, eat and break the misery and fear of the night. Johnson and he had been on little more than the level of animals and, crouching in his hole, he marvelled at the persistence and tenacity of the animal under the degradation and flimsy exaltations of the mind—so treacherous and incomplete an instrument. How pitiful the naked helplessness of the animal and yet how ancient its cunning! The very pain that went through the nerves, and the fever that hazed the eyes and the blood, gave an intoxication to the instinct to live. He swayed through his acts with the sixth sense of an inebriate.
The storm abated and a second storm followed as violent as the former one but shorter. Those detonations broke and crumbled like organ music in the depth of the cave. And the rain went on. In the early lulls he crawled to the cave mouth and flashed his light and called, but there was no answering call and the only sound was the rain in the trees. It did not cease and all night the downpour went on, like the sea breaking upon his rock. He had the sensation of being a shipwrecked man on a raft tossing in blackness. No human response came to the call and no animal sound.
The torch failed. He groped towards the heap of dry sticks he had been collecting in the cave and knelt over it feverishly beating flints to make an igniting spark. Beating, beating, eyes stretched with hope of the spark, the sound like castanets in the cave.
‘Oh God, give me fire,’ he called out, but even in his desperation a little theatrical in the use of the word
The power of his own voice among the rock was too great.
‘His bloody father!’ he said more quietly to trick the echoes. And slowly from this he drifted into prayer which was merely a return to the habits of his childhood:
‘Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallowed by Thy name.’
(Damn fool letting Harry have all the brandy.)
‘Thy Kingdom come.’
Get it through quickly unless a fear or pain stops you and then you have to begin again—
‘Our Father which art in Heaven . . .’
It degenerated into anything that came into his head and was never completed; bits out of Dickens from Harry’s Pickwick, imaginary speeches to Charles Wright and Harry, long detailed explanations justifying his conduct, any word that would annul fear. And he returned to hymns because his childhood was in them. The flints were still in his hands when he slipped back exhausted against the cave wall into agonised sleep.
The sun woke him. He had his clothes and the food out at once. The steam rose from them as it was rising from the trees. The earth was darker in colour, swamped, swollen and exhausted, and the low clouds were l
ike dirty trodden snow, yellowish with thaw and the sun lifting them. For miles the vapours were rising derelict from the trees and the water poured, though in lesser falls, from the rock. Darker clouds were blobbed over the distances and closing out the sky. The air was heavy and unbreathable with the steaming heat. It was extraordinary after all their cloudless and dazzling mornings to see the cloud stupor of the sky and the earth under it like some drunk, gross harlot who has slept where she has fallen. The smell of the forest was like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath.
‘The fool!’ he suddenly said, for the way to make a fire had suddenly come to him. He opened a cartridge, poured the powder into a little heap by the sticks in the cave and he had soon struck a spark large enough to start flame in the powder. He was so busy with his triumph with the fire that he did not notice that the sun had gone and that the rains had begun again. They came with no warning, as if the sky had been tipped up and the water emptied from it in a solid stream. He got the things in and set to work to dry them again. The smoke filled the cave and he was driven into the inner chamber.
In the past night Gilbert Phillips had touched the depths of human wretchedness and he had risen only a little way out of them on this morning. He worked painfully, listlessly, like a roped man and his eyes were as nervous as an animal’s glancing with apprehension and hope at the land from the mouth of his cave. He looked up at every sip of the hot drink he had made and at every puff of the distasteful pipe he smoked. His mind was divided between Harry and England. At the next glance Harry might be there and with every glance Phillips played the old trick of a man alone: the trick of populating the country around him. Houses appeared among the trees, rows of suburban villas, traffic and people. He made ideal colonies. He dreamed for himself a tribe. All these things protected him.
To act was vital but wearying. The sight of Harry’s gun stirred in him some almost superstitious sense of duty and he worked to clean and dry it. There was virtue in the weapon. He was astonished to find that one cartridge had been fired, because he had no recollection of firing it. The memory of the impulse to kill was distorted in his mind into a feeling of power in possession of the gun and another feeling of equality with Harry. This was very natural, for he had realised one of those curious, half-conscious desires of the march, one of those silent covetings of the traveller, in getting the gun out of Harry’s hands. But the fact remained that it was Harry Johnson’s gun and this knowledge expressed itself in a way that comes instinctively to man when he is living on the last line of primitive survival. On wiping and cleaning the gun there was a remote memory of a belief that goodness came out of it into himself and that the benefit of the act would reach Johnson too, wherever he was.
Dead Man Leading Page 21