Dead Man Leading

by V. S. Pritchett

  If Johnson had come back his practical, experienced eye would have seen that Phillips was doing most things badly. A belief in the possession of Harry’s golden luck was more urgent to this romantic than a careful counting and drying of stores. Johnson was one of those men who are not conscious of the forces that impel them but suppose merely some practical end. The impatient romanticism of Phillips was incapable of much careful attention to concrete fact; though he had helped plot the maps and had often studied the problem of direction with Johnson, he had really no very clear idea of where they were and how they would get out and he did not understand in the least that what Harry called ‘luck’ was really the result of careful thought, planning and common sense.

  The gun was, for Phillips grovelling in his cave, the symbol of this luck of Harry’s, his leadership and courage. The hope Phillips had was nevertheless small. Anxiety about Johnson’s fate could not be discussed. The rain though strong was fitful, and when it stopped he already expected Johnson to appear like a man who has been sheltering in a doorway near by. When Johnson did not come, the dread increased. He had pushed out of mind the prospect of another night alone, but now that prospect became more likely. He picked up the talismanic gun, gripping the barrel hard, and said:

  ‘I couldn’t stand another night. I couldn’t stand it. I would sooner shoot myself with this gun.’

  Still, there was time to hope. Only half of the day had gone, and now once more the rain had stopped, and the hot blue body of sky thrust limbs and shoulders through the cloud. Voluptuous and carnal in the sun was this Rubens-like sky, to the man of shivering, pain-thronged body in the cave. He sat outside on the rock to feel this warmth in his blood, though the insects teemed like another rain upon him.

  He dozed and woke and dozed again in the sun. It was in one of these jolted wakings that he saw a tall spindle of smoke rising from the bush. The distance was hard to judge. It looked a mile away. The smoke was thick and the colour of a vein in the hand, easily seen against the dark vegetation. The fire was in the part of the country through which Johnson might have passed.

  Phillips climbed higher on the rock and saw no other fires.

  It was a new fire, piled high with damp stuff, a signal no doubt. Harry had no gun to signal with so he had lit a fire! He had lit a fire on high ground to show he was on his way! He was held up there, perhaps by a river in flood; perhaps he, too, was water-logged and ill in some cave. Perhaps he was lost and was asking for guidance.

  Phillips hurried to build a fire of his own on the rock with the dry wood he had saved, and piled up more wet wood from the bush. He made a great fire and the smoke went up thick and white and bold. Still the unchanged smoke of the other fire went up straight against the trees and cloud.

  But a change in the light showed the nearness of the fire to be illusory. The smoke was more than a mile away, it might be two or three miles and there was no knowing what lay in the middle distance. Phillips went up again to the top of the rock and this time he saw that the hill lay under the sun, the direction Harry had taken not much later in the afternoon. But now there were two columns of smoke.

  Johnson would have lit only one.

  At once Phillips climbed breathlessly, heart-bursting, from the rock to his own fire and began breaking it up, throwing the burning sticks around him. He kicked at the embers and wished to pull down the smoke which, in agony, he saw escape him into the sky. Those columns were not Harry’s signals but what Harry had always hoped for and he, night after night, had dreaded in the march. The rains had come and the Indians were returning to the country they had deserted. Gilbert picked up the gun and stood back against the rock looking at a bush in which every shadow seemed the shadow of a crouching man and every dapple of sunlight a face brilliant with deceit.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He had to make up his mind and he was a man who could not make up his mind. He either sank back paralysed or went forward to his act on the uppermost instinct of the moment, dragging his quarrelling mind after him. He would go to heaven in dispute with hell and to hell in dispute with heaven, like old Captain Mommbrekke, Lucy’s father, in contention with his conscience. He would sing songs in church and hymns in a brothel. He would go on a journey he did not believe in with an objective that was absurd. He would die when he ought to live and, damnation take it, he would—if he survived—live when he ought to have been long ago dead. And now, if he stayed still and waited by the ruins of the fire he ought not to have built, he knew that it would have been better to go on,—and if he went on towards that distant smoke, he would have been wiser to have stayed.

  For—it was clear to him—the Indians were on Johnson’s route. They must have seen him. Or he must have seen them. Johnson had had a desire for the fires of the Indians as he might have had a desire for death. He would have gone to an Indian fire sooner than to water. The chances that they had missed each other, Indians and Johnson, were infinitesimal. Two men might miss each other, being on the opposite sides of a wood, but not if one of them was an Indian.

  Well, he (Phillips) had populated the trees, his instinct had dreamed a tribe of his own and here was his tribe.

  He waited for an hour to see what emissary would come from those fires, for his own must have been seen. It is the curious condition of profound fear to end by desiring the thing feared and Phillips, fear-nailed to his rock, was drawn out by his own magnet. His hands trembled. At last he was indignant that no one came, angry with Johnson for not coming if he were by some chance not in that camp, angry with the Indians for remaining there. Once or twice he considered firing a shot but he thought:

  No, now is not the time. A little later, when the time comes, I will fire.

  And when will the time come?

  I do not know. But there will come a time when I will fire then.

  The anger lit by his anxiety grew. He paced up and down the rock. He went to the cave and looked at his things. Useless, spoiled, not a day’s life in them. (This was quite untrue, but was how he thought about their stock.) He looked at the stuff in the manner of one who has finished with it. This is the end of one stage; let another begin. He understood the nausea he had before every minute of the past, the disgust with his kennel-cave. I am not going to die in a hole or live in a hole. Why the bloody hell don’t they come? Why doesn’t somebody come? Die here where I suffered? Endure another night in this place? No, any place but this place. Some other place, I beg.

  They did not come.

  Now he wanted to stand on the top of the rock like Samson taunting the Philistines. He wanted to shout to them. He did not shout but merely muttered and as the anger swelled him, and he stood gun in hand like a fuming sentry on his watch, he felt the luck of Harry in his hand and the courage of Harry too. If Harry was in their hands he must go to him, he must rescue him, surrender with him, parley with him. If Harry was leading them now in peace towards him, he must go and meet them. Whatever it was there must be an identity of fate between them. The love for Harry which had grown out of the love of Lucy demanded this.

  ‘Take care of him for me.’

  And what hatred and jealousy of Harry there had been demanded it too, if any were left after the forgotten mock-murder of the day before:

  He must not die away from me and let me die, but if there is to be dying we must die in the same place.

  The mystery of the father is made clear by the virtue of the son.

  And I do not want to be alone.

  He had taken his bearings now; with his anger and his joy he relit the fire for a mark, strapped on his pack and climbed down the rock into the swamped bush. He was going to Harry. To Harry and Harry and Harry! ‘Two men are better than one.’

  It was what he had always wanted: to be the conqueror and rescuer; and though at once he saw the bush was sodden and great eyes of water opened in it, waist-deep streams had to be crossed and on all sides the trees were awash and water-birds had come down to these lakes, he was not intimidated or tricked by sudden
depths. Lucy was with him talking even as he hauled himself up the mud of a bank or stopped, on rising ground, to regain the sight of the guiding smoke or guess with cunning his direction. They were going to Harry. She was to near to him, sometimes beside him and sometimes in himself, so that he talked and laughed with her voice. There could not be a closer possession. There could not be a greater unity of the soul and from their unity this lucky courage came.

  The sighting of the smoke had become more difficult and there were long stages in which it could not be seen, or when it had become far more distant. He though he was there on the next rise but there was a vale and a rise beyond it. A shallow valley presently opened, descending across his path, a valley which widened and deepened on the south-eastern side, away from his route, until the forest thickened on the rising hills beside it. A great panorama of forest lay beyond this rift far below the plateau.

  He stopped in amazement at this sight. He was looking down upon an endless sun-shot sea to trees without break or landmark on it. He and Harry had been mice nibbling at a continent. But he stopped too, because it was clear that a man in search of water would inevitably have descended this valley where now the swamps drained into half a dozen streams.

  Phillips crossed the valley with his first doubts and they broke the unity of his spirit. The company of Lucy left him and now he floundered. He began to walk warily round the flooded stretches instead of splashing through them. In the tree belts he sank into a rotten floor of fallen trunks piled waist deep; sometimes his foot would go through the infested shells of the tree-trunks and he was up to his ribs in the wreckage of the forest floor and the biting flies went up in black clouds around him. He was going uphill now, panting in the green stench.

  In the struggle it seemed to him he became huge and more vulnerable at every step, grotesquely naked to watching eyes. Where were the eyes? Where were the listening ears? Did they hear this crash of branch, this curse as he slipped? From one log he fell full length into the bark mud; he half smiled, apologising to invisible eyes for unpresentable appearance. Could it be explained that Englishman, no ulterior motive, looking for another Englishman, had fallen down, got muddy, meant no harm, would put all right in a minute? Could it be explained that he was not alone; oh no, advance-guard of whole nation, you dare touch us! You let that man free! Please understand. Civilised men in love with same woman lost in your country, searching that gentleman’s father. Appeal common human feelings, blow your brains out if you move. He was almost at the top. Ten yards before the hole of sky ahead became level ground.

  ‘Christ!’ said Phillips.

  He clutched at anything and then, panting, exhausted he was there. Headlong there, for down he went again in the opening flat on his face and the gun went off.

  ‘Did not intend that, but since signal has been made . . .’

  They were waiting for him there, fifty yards away—the Indians. They looked at him and ran, vanished like deer into the bush.

  They found him on his hands and knees. The Indians came first and then the three Germans and the Dane. They asked him who he was and, when he answered, one of them replied in slow bad English.

  He said he was looking for his friend. Two of them laughed loudly at this. They were short, thick men. Two were bald but the Dane had thick fair hair.

  ‘Don’t laugh at him,’ the Dane said.

  ‘What friend?’ they said.

  Where did he come from?

  They saw him stand up and then his legs went under him.

  They carried him into the camp. Twenty Indian porters were with the Germans and they had mules. The Indians had built thatched shelters on poles. The camp had suffered from the rains.

  They gave him brandy and waited.

  ‘We saw your fire,’ they said. ‘Our men were frightened. They would have killed you but for the gun.’

  ‘It was lucky having the gun,’ he said. ‘It belongs to my friend.’

  ‘Don’t disturb him,’ the Dane said.

  They left him alone. He was lying in a hammock under the thatch.

  Epilogue

  Chapter Eighteen

  I read the article,’ she said. ‘You don’t think it is he? You don’t think he will ever be found? It just won’t ever be known?’

  ‘If you had seen that country!’ he said. ‘Cut it down, every plant and bush in it, and the whole place would be covered again in six weeks. It’s like the sea. It drowns you.’

  ‘Do you think he was drowned?’

  ‘I think he was. I certainly don’t think he’s alive. The Germans who searched for him thought he was drowned. He must have gone by that valley, the one I crossed, the one I told you about. He was looking for water. Well, he must have gone down that valley along the river-bed. All that country was draining into it. And he had no gun, you must remember that. He left the gun with me.’

  The gun was standing in the corner of the room. The fire in the dim January afternoon made a seam of light along the barrel. They had talked themselves to silence. The street air hummed against the windows and there was the gritty sound of London rain. He was still not used to the sounds.

  ‘Well, Lucy,’ he said, in another voice to change the subject, ‘when is it going to be?’

  She was sitting beside the fire.

  ‘What? Oh, you mean the baby?’ she said. ‘In April.’

  ‘And you’re happy?’ he said, tipping back his chair.

  ‘Yes, very happy,’ she said absently.

  ‘I’m glad you’re happy,’ he said.

  ‘Gilbert,’ she began again for she would not let him change the subject. ‘It was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake. I knew this would happen.’

  ‘It was not your fault,’ he said, misunderstanding her.

  ‘I don’t mean it was a mistake that we loved each other.’

  ‘Harry and you . . . ?’ he asked, jolting down the legs of the tilted chair. For she might mean himself. Even now she still might mean this.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said with a hard, cool dart of her voice. ‘I mean it would have been a mistake for us to have married. He would have killed any woman. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t nice.’

  ‘He would have hated her for being a woman,’ Gilbert said.

  ‘He wanted women to be men,’ she said. ‘He really wanted me to be a man. In his head he did.’

  ‘He was in love with his father,’ Gilbert said.

  He looked into the fire and the coal was like a rock and the glow below it like the glade in the fierce sun. A man was walking away down the glade without pack or arms. Phillips remembered this. He remembered only the back and head of the man in the sun and nothing more. The sorrow of that last sight had gone but an unaccountable feeling of shame and triumph returned—shame that all attempts to find Harry Johnson had failed, the shame of the day when the Germans gave up and broke camp, saying, ‘He is dead. He must be dead. We can’t stay here and we have looked everywhere. We have been to the rock and the river. It has risen fifteen feet and is mile wide now and still rising. He cannot possibly have lived. He was right about the river and the water but if he got there that night he could not have got back.’ Phillips looked at the trees. Where in those trees was Harry lying? Or standing? ‘I cannot leave him in those trees. Shall they leave me behind to look for him? They can give me stores and an Indian and I will stay here.’ It was a dilemma. The Germans were going down the valley into that country which had looked in the sun like a Promised Land, down the valley Harry must have taken, and they were going beyond where he could be because they had boats. He could go with them but in a day they would pass Harry’s utmost limit and then, following their river, would ultimately reach the coast. Or he could stay there, daring and seeking the identity of fate, waiting with an Indian, and then, if Harry did not appear, he and the Indian would return to the branch of the main river by which the Germans had come ten miles away.

  The Germans looked at him with pity and talked among themselves in their language. They kne
w about him. They knew about him not only by what he had told them but from Calcott. They had passed through that town. They expressed no opinion but there was the hint of a smile on their lips when they talked of the importance of using modern methods. How many weeks was he on the river? So! They had done it in half the time. They talked of the fast motor launch they had brought down from New York. They had heard a man had died. Now two men had died.

  There was a luxury in the pity of the Germans, something to accept with one hand and to reject with one’s secret pride. His jokes were translated. The Germans laughed. He was a witty fellow.

  But the rains were upon them. Every day the sky emptied and the country steamed. One of the Germans fell sick. That—if the decision was not taken long ago in this cradle—decided Phillips.

  ‘I’ll go with these people. They have been good.’ They seemed—or did he image this?—to despise him for his decision.

  They set off, a straggling procession, the Indians with the boats on their heads, heads bobbing like corks through the tall grass. For a quarter of a mile the line was drawn out, here three or four men, there one alone and then the group walking by the litter on which the sick man was carried. The cursing when, in the bottom of the valley, they came to the headwaters of the river! The natives who went back!