Dead Man Leading
Page 23
‘You know your friend, I mean your other friend,’ said the bald, dark-eyed German who spoke English. He tapped his feet to explain. ‘Boots,’ he said. ‘It has become a political affair because a Brazilian was thrown into gaol on a false charge of stealing his boots. They said it was a manoeuvre of the clerical party.’
Two promontories of the forest rose above the valley and he and the Germans were walking at the foot of them in the steaming greenhouse shade of the great ferns. He smiled, and their talk had covered Phillips’ retreat and the unreasonable shame of retreat.
‘We couldn’t do more than we did, Lucy,’ Gilbert said, looking up from the fire. ‘I could have stayed but it was futile. I really think it would have been futile.’
‘It was brave of you to go on too,’ she said. ‘You had no choice.’
‘I hadn’t. I can’t believe it yet. But I hadn’t,’ he said.
‘And in the end,’ he said, wishing to God that every word he spoke about the expedition was not haunted by the forced note of self-justification, ‘we passed by Charles’s country. It was no different from anywhere else. It might have been anywhere. Just trees. Nothing but trees and trees. I was glad about that. It was like finishing Charles’s job. It wiped out something. I told you?’
She nodded. The bones of her face were more prominent, the eyes deeper set. She looked as though she had gone back to her religious ways which gave her a heavy expression of obstinacy, slight illness and distance. She was only pretending to listen to him.
She was thinking all the time of the shock of seeing him. She did not wish to go over the past, she did not wish to dig up the dead. She had known for a long time that he was in England and she had avoided him, put him off in her letters. Couldn’t he see that everything was different for her now?
But when he said, ‘That wiped out something,’ her heart said:
‘And my child, doesn’t that wipe out something? You cannot tell me now that I ought not have married. I had to marry. I had to marry when he went. I was thinking as the steamer sailed and Harry was waving from the deck, how slowly the ship moves from the dock! Make it quicker so that we can be out of each other’s sight at once because I must marry before I get the chance to catch the next boat and go after him. I must chain myself down. I must marry someone quickly. And when I had married I thought, “This hasn’t chained me.” Marrying isn’t enough to wipe out that man, I must have a child.’
She was defending herself. She was defending herself from her grief. The wound Harry had made in her was intolerable. They had loved like robbers.
One had to annul that feeling. One must smother the old with the new. If one can spin enough words they will fall like a web over the old feeling and change it. She had a child now. That put Harry and Charles and Gilbert in the past. The child, with new demands, wiped out the betrayal of marrying. She saw Gilbert looking at her and she could feel her growing child, then her husband, then all the months of the past year, the exchanged letters placed between Gilbert and herself. He looked older. The fair hair was bleached, the tanned face was leaner in the jaw. But his voice was the same and his manner had not changed; too disturbingly they recalled the year.
‘Why are you frowning, Lucy?’
‘Was I?’ She laughed. How observant he was. Lost in his strange world of his duty to Charles, his duty to Harry, the subtleties of honour and obligation—and yet so observant! Her parted lips closed with the stern, placid line they now so frequently chose.
She was frowning because when she looked at him, heard his voice which seemed to attack her with his story, she could not believe she had been his mistress. She had been fearful of coming to see him because she had felt that he would bring not himself only but the intolerable presence of Harry to her. She feared that she might discover she loved him because of this.
But she did not love him. He brought to her this ineluctable knowledge that where once was feeling there could be nothing.
‘Were you surprised when you got my letter?’ she asked. ‘The one I sent to Rio? Were you in hospital then?’
‘I’ve never been surprised at anything you did, you know,’ he smiled.
‘I hadn’t heard then, not even about Charles,’ she said. ‘We’d been married a week when I heard. It was awful and frightening. I didn’t write to Charles. Harry felt badly about him, you know, and as I wasn’t writing to Harry I thought I had better not write him. It would have worried him.’
‘You didn’t write to me,’ he said. ‘Is that why?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said.
‘Did you tell Harry you wouldn’t write?’
‘I didn’t say anything. It was over. We agreed it was over. I thought I would wait till the expedition was finished, to give him time to forget about it, and then’—her grave voice became quicker and lighter with the gaiety he remembered—‘just write him a very friendly letter.’
She valued the art she had of concealing feeling. With Harry she had dropped the pretence fatally. Never again. She gazed at Gilbert out of her mists and fictions. He was the same man, but dead to her, more dead even than Harry and Charles were.
But she was not the same woman. Or she was not the woman he had carried in his head with Harry. He could not even recall the times he had seen her with Harry except that last night of Harry’s in England, when he had seen her on the stairs in her white nightdress calling him. The slave in her had gone, who followed Harry picking up his clothes, collecting his papers, making arrangements for him, agreeing to do all the things she disliked because Harry asked her—did not even ask but said, ‘this is what we are going to do.’ He could not recall those times. The new fashions changed her, the height of hat, the new dress. They gave a brisker, more actual, appearance—a woman who sits at a bare table having swept away the old papers.
They must get up and go before they had to admit they were bored with each other; and bored because each reminded the other of too many dead things. It was necessary to be bored.
He said, going to the corner of the room where the gun was and bringing it to the fire:
‘It was Harry’s,’ he said. ‘He left it with me. I told you. I should like to give it to you.’ He was embarrassed. What an absurd gift to a woman!
He wanted to get it out of his sight. He did not want to be reminded of the day of the rock, the last day he had seen Harry.
But she thought, ‘This is too much!’ She had not told her husband anything.
She and Gilbert were trying to hand each other their guilt.
No, you must keep it,’ she said. ‘It ought to be yours, Gilbert,’ she said.
They stood by the fire hesitating. She lowered her eyes and then, raising them, again said gently, half laughing:
‘But I couldn’t take it now. It’s heavy. I couldn’t go through the streets with a gun. Some other time. . .’
‘And I must go, Gilbert dear,’ she said.
Suddenly he wanted to laugh at this ridiculous situation.
He went to the door and switched on the light. He saw then that at one time in the difficult talk she had wept. She held out her hand.
‘Don’t worry about the newspapers. Newspapers make me sick,’ he said, picking up the paper from the table. It was she who had brought the paper; indeed the paragraph that she had read there had made her come to see him. He looked again at the paragraph. ‘They’ll find him twice a year after this. Just like his father. There will always be rumours,’ he said.
‘And he hated anyone even to speak of anything he did,’ she said.
He went with her to the door. Nothing could have been more like the river and the jungle and the sudden squawk of birds to his unaccustomed sight and ear, than the street light-daubed in the rain, the impenetrable forest of lives of people in the houses and the weird hoot and flash of the cars. He went back to his room, wishing for a friend.
For my Wife
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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First published 1937 by Chatto & Windus
Copyright © V. S. Pritchett 1937
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ISBN: 9781448200511
eISBN 9781448201839
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