Under The Volcano Part 6

In this garden, which he hadn't looked at since the day Hugh arrived, when he'd hidden the bottle, and which seemed carefully and lovingly kept, there existed at the moment certain evidence of work left uncompleted: tools, unusual tools, a murderous machete, an oddly shaped fork, somehow nakedly impaling the mind, with its twisted tines glittering in the sunlight, were leaning against the fence, as also was something else, a sign uprooted or new, whose oblong pallid face stared through the wire at him. Le gusta este jardin? it asked...

LE GUSTA ESTE JARDiN?.

QUE ES SUYO?.

EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!.

The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one's being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne's departure.

However he was drinking tequila again now--and with no very clear idea how he'd returned so quickly and found the bottle. Ah, the subtle bouquet of pitch and teredos! Careless of being observed this time, he drank long and deeply, then stood--and he had been observed too, by his neighbour Mr Quincey, who was watering flowers in the shade of their common fence to the left beyond the briars--stood facing his bungalow once more. He felt hemmed in. Gone was the little dishonest vision of order. Over his house, above the spectres of neglect that now refused to disguise themselves, the tragic wings of untenable responsibilities hovered. Behind him, in the other garden, his fate repeated softly: "Why is it yours?... Do you like this garden?... We evict those who destroy!" Perhaps the sign didn't mean quite that--for alcohol sometimes affected the Consul's Spanish adversely (or perhaps the sign itself, inscribed by some Aztec, was wrong)--but it was near enough. Coming to an abrupt decision he dropped the tequila into the undergrowth again and turned back towards the public garden, walking with an attempted "easy" stride.

Not that he had any intention of "verifying" the words on the sign, which certainly seemed to have more question marks than it should have; no, what he wanted, he now saw very clearly, was to talk to someone: that was necessary: but it was more, merely, than that; what he wanted involved something like the grasping, at this moment, of a brilliant opportunity, or more accurately, of an opportunity to be brilliant, an opportunity evinced by that apparition of Mr Quincey through the briars which, now upon his right, he must circ.u.mvent in order to reach him. Yet this opportunity to be brilliant was, in turn, more like something else, an opportunity to be admired; even, and he could at least thank the tequila for such honesty, however brief its duration, to be loved. Loved precisely for what was another question: since he'd put it to himself he might answer: loved for my reckless and irresponsible appearance, or rather for the fact that, beneath that appearance, so obviously burns the fire of genius, which, not so obviously, is not my genius but in an extraordinary manner that of my old and good friend, Abraham Taskerson, the great poet, who once spoke so glowingly of my potentialities as a young man.

And what he wanted then, ah then (he had turned right without looking at the sign and was following the path along the wire fence), what he wanted then, he thought, casting one yearning glance at the plains--and at this moment he could have sworn that a figure, the details of whose dress he did not have time to make out before it departed, but apparently in some kind of mourning, had been standing, head bowed in deepest anguish, near the centre of the public garden--what you want then, Geoffrey Firmin, if only as an antidote against such routine hallucinations, is, why it is, nothing less than to drink; to drink, indeed, all day, just as the clouds once more bid you, and yet not quite; again it is more subtle than this; you do not wish merely to drink, but to drink in a particular place and in a particular town.

Parian!... It was a name suggestive of old marble and the gale-swept Cyclades. The Farolito in Parian, how it called to him with its gloomy voices of the night and early dawn. But the Consul (he had inclined right again leaving the wire fence behind) realized he wasn't yet drunk enough to be very sanguine about his chances of going there; the day offered too many immediate--pitfalls! It was the exact word... He had almost fallen into the barranca, an unguarded section of whose hither bank--the ravine curved sharply down here towards the Alcapancingo road to curve again below and follow its direction, bisecting the public garden--added at this juncture a tiny fifth side to his estate. He paused, peeping, tequila-unafraid, over the bank. Ah the frightful cleft, the eternal horror of opposites! Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, deride me not, though I seem petulant to fall into thy chops. One was, come to that, always stumbling upon the d.a.m.ned thing, this immense intricate donga cutting right through the town, right, indeed, through the country, in places a two-hundred-foot sheer drop into what pretended to be a churlish river during the rainy season, but which, even now, though one couldn't see the bottom, was probably beginning to resume its normal role of general Tartarus and gigantic jakes. It was, perhaps, not so frightening here: one might even climb down, if one wished, by easy stages of course, and taking the occasional swig of tequila on the way, to visit the cloacal Prometheus who doubtless inhabited it. The Consul walked on more slowly. He had come face to face with his house again and simultaneously to the path skirting Mr Quincey's garden. On his left beyond their common fence, now at hand, the green lawns of the American, at the moment being sprinkled by innumerable small whizzing hoses, swept down parallel with his own briars. Nor could any English turf have appeared smoother or lovelier. Suddenly overwhelmed by sentiment, as at the same time by a violent attack of hiccups, the Consul stepped behind a gnarled fruit tree rooted on his side but spreading its remnant of shade over the other, and leaned against it, holding his breath. In this curious way he imagined himself hidden from Mr Quincey, working farther up, but he soon forgot all about Quincey in spasmodic admiration of his garden... Would it happen at the end, and would this save one, that old Popeye would begin to seem less desirable than a slag-heap in Chesterle-Street, and that mighty Johnsonian prospect, the road to England, would stretch out again in the Western Ocean of his soul? And how peculiar that would be! How strange the landing at Liverpool, the Liver. Building seen once more through the misty rain, that murk smelling already of nosebags and Caegwyrle Ale--the familiar deep-draughted cargo steamers, harmoniously masted, still sternly sailing outward bound with the tide, worlds of iron hiding their crews from the weeping black-shawled women on the piers: Liverpool, whence sailed so often during the war under sealed orders those mysterious submarine catchers Q-boats, fake freighters turning into turreted men-of-war at a moment's notice, obsolete peril of submarines, the snouted voyagers of the sea's unconscious...

"Dr. Livingstone, I presume."

"Hicket," said the Consul, taken aback by the premature rediscovery, at such close quarters, of the tall slightly stooping figure, in khaki shirt and grey flannel trousers, sandalled, immaculate, grey-haired, complete, fit, a credit to Soda Springs, and carrying a watering-can, who was regarding him distastefully through horn-rimmed spectacles from the other side of the fence. "Ah, good morning, Quincey."

"What's good about it?" the retired walnut grower asked suspiciously, continuing his work of watering his flower beds, which were out of range of the ceaselessly swinging hoses.

The Consul gestured towards his briars, and perhaps unconsciously also in the direction of the tequila bottle. "I saw you from over there... I was just out inspecting my jungle, don't you know."

"You are doing what?" Mr Quincey glanced at him over the top of the watering-can as if to say: I have seen all this going on; I know all about it because I am G.o.d, and even when G.o.d was much older than you are he was nevertheless up at this time and fighting it, if necessary, while you don't even know whether you're up or not yet, and even if you have been out all night you are certainly not fighting it, as I would be, just as I would be ready to fight anything or anybody else too, for that matter, at the drop of a hat!

"And I'm afraid it really is a jungle too," pursued the Consul, "in fact I expect Rousseau to come riding out of it at any moment on a tiger."

"What's that?" Mr Quincey said, frowning in a manner that might have meant: And G.o.d never drinks before breakfast either.

"On a tiger," the Consul repeated.

The other gazed at him a moment with the cold sardonic eye of the material world. "I expect so," he said sourly. "Plenty tigers. Plenty elephants too... Might I ask you if the next time you inspect your jungle you'd mind being sick on your own side of the fence?"

"Hicket," answered the Consul simply. "Hicket," he snarled, laughing, and, trying to take himself by surprise, he thwacked himself hard in the kidneys, a remedy which, strangely, seemed to work. "Sorry I gave that impression, it was merely this d.a.m.ned hiccups!--"

"So I observe," Mr Quincey said, and perhaps he too had cast a subtle glance towards the ambush of the tequila bottle.

"And the funny thing is," interrupted the Consul, "I scarcely touched anything more than Tehuacan water all night... By the way; how did you manage to survive the ball?"

Mr Quincey stared at him evenly, then began to refill his watering can from a hydrant nearby.

"Just Tehuacan," the Consul continued. "And a little gaseosa. That ought to take you back to dear old Soda Springs, eh?--tee hee!--yes, I've cut liquor right out these days."

The other resumed his watering, sternly moving on down the fence, and the Consul, not sorry to leave the fruit tree, to which he had noticed clinging the sinister carapace of a seven-year locust, followed him step by step.

"Yes, I'm on the wagon now," he commented, "in case you didn't know." "The funeral wagon, I'd say, Firmin," Mr Quincey muttered testily. "By the way, I saw one of those little garter snakes just a moment ago," the Consul broke out.

Mr Quincey coughed or snorted but said nothing.

"And it made me think... Do you know, Quincey, I've often wondered whether there isn't more in the old legend of the Garden of Eden, and so on, than meets the eye. What if Adam wasn't really banished from the place at all? That is, in the sense we used to understand it--" The walnut grower had looked up and was fixing him with a steady gaze that seemed, however, directed at a point rather below the Consul's midriff--"What if his punishment really consisted," the Consul continued with warmth, "in his having to go on living there , alone, of course--suffering, unseen, cut off from G.o.d... Or perhaps," he added,--in more cheerful vein, "perhaps Adam was the first property owner and G.o.d, the first agrarian, a kind of Cardenas, in fact--tee hee!--kicked him out. Eh? Yes," the Consul chuckled, aware, moreover, that all this was possibly not so amusing under the existing historical circ.u.mstances, "for it's obvious to everyone these days--don't you think so, Quincey?--that the original sin was to be an owner of property..."

The walnut grower was nodding at him, almost imperceptibly, but not it seemed in any agreement; his realpolitik eye was still concentrated upon that same spot below his midriff and looking down the Consul discovered his open fly. Licentia vatum indeed! "Pardon me, j'adoube," he said, and making the adjustment continued, laughing, returning to his first theme mysteriously unabashed by his recusancy. "Yes, indeed. Yes... And of course the real reason for that punishment--his being forced to go on living in the garden, I mean, might well have been that the poor fellow, who knows, secretly loathed the place! Simply hated it, and had done so all along. And that the Old Man found this out--"

"Was it my imagination, or did I see your wife up there a while ago?" patiently said Mr Quincey.

"--and no wonder! To h.e.l.l with the place! Just think of all the scorpions and leafcutter ants--to mention only a few of the abominations he must have had to put up with! What?" the Consul exclaimed as the other repeated his question. "In the garden? Yes--that is, no. How do you know? No, she's asleep as far as I--"

"Been away quite a time, hasn't she?" the other asked mildly, leaning forward so that he could see, more clearly, the Consul's bungalow. "Your brother still here?"

"Brother? Oh. you mean Hugh... No, he's in Mexico City."

"I think you'll find he's got back."

The Consul now glanced up at the house himself. "Hicket," he said briefly, apprehensively.

"I think he went out with your wife," the walnut grower added.

--Hullo--hullo--look--who-comes-hullo-my-little-snake-in-the-gra.s.s-my-little-anguish-in-herba--" the Consul at this moment greeted Mr Quincey's cat, momentarily forgetting its owner again as the grey, meditative animal, with a tail so long it trailed on the ground, came stalking through the zinnias: he stooped, patting his thighs--"h.e.l.lo-p.u.s.s.y-my-little-Priapusspuss, my-little-Oedipusspusspuss," and the cat, recognizing a friend and uttering a cry of pleasure, wound through the fence and rubbed against the Consul's legs, purring. "My little Xicotencatl." The Consul stood up. He gave two short whistles while below him the cat's ears twirled. "She thinks I'm a tree with a bird in it," he added.

"I wouldn't wonder," retorted Mr Quincey, who was refilling his watering can at the hydrant.

"Animals not fit for food and kept only for pleasure, curiosity, or whim--eh?--as William Blackstone said--you've heard of him of course!--" The Consul was somehow on his haunches half talking to the cat, half to the walnut grower, who had paused to light a cigarette. "Or was that another William Blackstone?" He addressed himself now directly to Mr Quincey, who was paying no attention. "He's a character I've always liked. I think it was William Blackstone. Or so Abraham... Anyway, one day he arrived in what is now, I believe---no matter--somewhere in Ma.s.sachusetts. And lived there quietly among the Indians. After a while the Puritans settled on the other side of the river. They invited him over; they said it was healthier on that side, you see. Ah, these people, these fellows with ideas," he told the cat, "old William didn't like them--no he didn't--so he went back to live among the Indians, so he did. But the Puritans found him out, Quincey, trust them. Then he disappeared altogether--G.o.d knows where... Now , little cat," the Consul tapped his chest indicatively, and the cat, its face swelling, body arched, important, stepped back, "the Indians are in here."

"They sure are," sighed Mr Quincey, somewhat in the manner of a quietly exacerbated sergeant-major, "along with all those snakes and pink elephants and them tigers you were talking about."

The Consul laughed, his laughter having a humourless sound, as though the part of his mind that knew all this essentially a burlesque of a great and generous man once his friend knew also how hollow the satisfaction afforded him by the performance. "Not real Indians... And I didn't mean in the garden; but in here " He tapped his chest again. "Yes, just the final frontier of consciousness, that's all. Genius, as I'm so fond of saying," he added, standing up, adjusting his tie and (he did not think further of the tie) squaring his shoulders as if to go with a decisiveness that, also borrowed on this occasion from the same source as the genius and his interest in cats, left him abruptly as it had been a.s.sumed, "--genius will look after itself."

Somewhere in the distance a clock was striking; the Consul still stood there motionless. "Oh, Yvonne, can I have forgotten you already, on this of all days?" Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one strokes. By his watch it was a quarter to eleven. But the clock hadn't finished: it struck twice more, two wry, tragic notes: bing-bong : whirring. The emptiness in the air after filled with whispers: alas, alas . Wings, it really meant.

"Where's your friend these days--I never can remember his name--that French fellow?" Mr Quincey had asked a moment ago.

" Laruelle?" The Consul's voice came from far away. He was aware of vertigo; closing his eyes wearily he took hold of the fence to steady himself. Mr Quincey's words knocked on his consciousness--or someone actually was knocking on a door--fell away, then knocked again, louder. Old De Quincey; the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. Knock, knock, knock: who's there? Cat. Cat who? Catastrophe. Catastrophe who? Catastro-physicist. What, is it you, my little popocat? Just wait an eternity till Jacques and I have finished murdering sleep? Katabasis to cat abysses. Cat hartes atratus... Of course, he should have know it, these were the final moments of the retiring of the human heart, and of the final entrance of the fiendish, the night insulated--just as the real De Quincey (that mere drug fiend, he thought opening his eyes--he found he was looking straight over towards the tequila bottle) imagined the murder of Duncan and the others insulated, self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly pa.s.sion... But where had Quincey gone? And my G.o.d, who was this advancing behind the morning paper to his rescue across the lawn, where the breath of the hoses had suddenly failed as if by magic, if not Dr. Guzman?

If not Guzman, if not, it could not be, but it was, it certainly was no less a figure than that of his companion the night before, Dr. Vigil; and what on earth would he be doing here? As the figure approached closer the Consul felt an increasing uneasiness. Quincey was his patient doubtless. But in that case why wasn't the doctor in the house? Why all this secretive prowling about the garden? It could only mean one thing: Vigil's visit had somehow been timed to coincide with his own probable visit to the tequila (though he had fooled them neatly there), with the object, naturally, of spying upon him, of obtaining some information about him, some clue to the nature of which might all too conceivably be found within the pages of that accusing newspaper: "Old Samaritan case to be reopened, Commander Firmin believed in Mexico." "Firmin found guilty, acquitted, cries in box." "Firmin innocent, but bears guilt of world on shoulders." "Body of Firmin found drunk in bunker," such monstrous headlines as these indeed took instant shape in the Consul's mind, for it was not merely El Universal the doctor was reading, it was his fate; but the creatures of his more immediate conscience were not to be denied, they seemed silently to accompany that morning paper too, withdrawing to one side (as the doctor came to a standstill, looking about him) with averted heads, listening, murmuring now: "You cannot lie to us. We know what you did last night." What had he done though? He saw again clearly enough--as Dr. Vigil, recognized him with a smile, closed his paper and hastened towards him--the doctor's consulting-room in the Avenida de la Revolucion, visited for some drunken reason in the early hours of the morning, macabre with its pictures of ancient Spanish surgeons, their goat faces rising queerly from ruffs resembling ectoplasm, roaring with laughter as they performed inquisitorial operations; but since all this was retained as a mere vivid setting completely detached from his own activity, and since it was about all he did remember, he could scarcely take comfort from not seeming to appear within it in any vicious role. Not so much comfort, at least, as had just been afforded him by Vigil's smile, nor half so much as was now afforded him when the doctor, upon reaching the spot lately vacated by the walnut grower, halted, and, suddenly, bowed to him profoundly from the waist; bowed once, twice, thrice, mutely yet tremendously a.s.suring the Consul that after all no crime had been committed during the night so great he was still not worthy of respect.

Then, simultaneously, the two men groaned.

"Que t--" began the Consul.

"Por favor," broke in the other hoa.r.s.ely, placing a well-manicured though shaky finger to his lips, and with a slightly worried look up the garden.

The Consul nodded. "Of course. You're looking so fit, I see you can't have been at the ball last night," he added loudly and loyally, following the other's gaze, though Mr Quincey, who after all could not have been so fit, was still nowhere to be seen.

He had probably been turning off the hoses at the main hydrant--and how absurd to have suspected a "plan" when it was so patently an informal call and the doctor had just happened to notice Quincey working in the garden from the drive. He lowered his voice. "All the same, might I take this opportunity of asking you what you prescribe for a slight case of katzenjammer?"

The doctor gave another worried look down the garden and began to laugh quietly, though his whole body was shaking with mirth, his white teeth flashed in the sun, even his immaculate blue suit seemed to be laughing. "Senor" he began, biting off his laughter short on his lips, like a child, with his front teeth. "Senor Firmin, por favor" I am sorry, but I must comport myself here like," he looked round him again, catching his breath, "like an apostle. You mean, senor" he went on more evenly, "that you are feeling fine this morning, quite like the cat's pyjama's."

"Well: hardly," said the Consul, softly as before, casting a suspicious eye for his part in the other direction at some maguey growing beyond the barranca, like a battalion moving up a slope under machine-gun fire. "Perhaps that's an overstatement. To put it more simply, what would you do for a case of chronic, controlled, all-possessing, and inescapable delirium tremens?"

Dr. Vigil started. A half-playful smile hovered at the corner of his lips as he contrived rather unsteadily to roll up his paper into a neat cylindrical tube. "You mean, not cats--" he said, and he made a swift rippling circular crawling gesture in front of his eyes with one hand, "but rather-"

The Consul nodded cheerfully. For his mind was at rest. He had caught a glimpse of those morning headlines, which seemed entirely concerned with the Pope's illness and the Battle of the Ebro.

"--progresion" the doctor was repeating the gesture more slowly with his eyes closed, his fingers crawling separately, curved like claws, his head shaking idiotically. "--a ratos!" he pounced. "Si," he said, pursing his lips and clapping his hand to his forehead in a motion of mock horror. "Si," he repeated. "Tereebly... More alcohol is perhaps best," he smiled.

"Your doctor tells me that in my case delirium tremens may not prove fatal," the Consul, triumphantly himself at last, informed Mr Quincey, who came up just at this moment.

And at the next moment, though not before there had pa.s.sed between himself and the doctor a barely perceptible exchange of signals, a tiny symbolic mouthward flick of the wrist on the Consul's side as he glanced up at his bungalow, and upon Vigil's a slight flapping movement of the arms extended apparently in the act of stretching, which meant (in the obscure language known only to major adepts in the Great Brotherhood of Alcohol), "Come up and have a spot when you've finished," "I shouldn't, for if I do I shall be 'flying,' but on second thoughts perhaps I will"--it seemed he was back drinking from his bottle of tequila. And, the moment after, that he was drifting slowly and powerfully through the sunlight back towards the bungalow itself. Accompanied by Mr Quincey's cat, who was following an insect of some sort along his path, the Consul floated in an amber glow. Beyond the house, where now the problems awaiting him seemed already on the point of energetic solution, the day before him stretched out like an illimitable rolling wonderful desert in which one was going, though in a delightful way, to be lost: lost, but not so completely he would be unable to find the few necessary water-holes, or the scattered tequila oases where witty legionnaires of d.a.m.nation who couldn't understand a word he said, would wave him on, replenished, into that glorious Parian wilderness where man never went thirsty, and where now he was drawn on beautifully by the dissolving mirages past the skeletons like frozen wire and the wandering dreaming lions towards ineluctable personal disaster, always in a delightful way of course, the disaster might even be found at the end to contain a certain element of triumph. Not that the Consul now felt gloomy. Quite the contrary. The outlook had rarely seemed so bright. He became conscious, for the first time, of the extraordinary activity which everywhere surrounded him in his garden: a lizard going up a tree, another kind of lizard coming down another tree, a bottle-green humming-bird exploring a flower, another kind of humming-bird, voraciously at another flower; huge b.u.t.terflies, whose precise st.i.tched markings reminded one of the blouses in the market, flopping about with indolent gymnastic grace (much as Yvonne had described them greeting her in Acapulco Bay yesterday, a storm of torn-up multicoloured love-letters, tossing to windward past the saloons on the promenade deck); ants with petals or scarlet blossoms tacking hither and thither along the paths; while from above, below, from the sky, and, it might be, from under the earth, came a continual sound of whistling, gnawing, rattling, even trumpeting. Where was his friend the snake now? Hiding up a pear tree probably. A snake that waited to drop rings on you: wh.o.r.e's shoes. From the branches of these pear trees hung carafes full of a glutinous yellow substance for trapping insects still changed religiously every month by the local horticultural college. (How gay were the Mexicans! The horticulturalists made the occasion, as they made every possible occasion, a sort of dance, bringing their womenfolk with them, flitting from tree to tree, gathering up and replacing the carafes as though the whole thing were a movement in a comic ballet, afterwards lolling about in the shade for hours, as if the Consul himself did not exist.) Then the behaviour of Mr Quincey's cat began to fascinate him. The creature had at last caught the insect but instead of devouring it, she was holding its body, still uninjured, delicately between her teeth, while its lovely luminous wings, still beating, for the insect had not stopped flying an instant, protruded from either side of her whiskers, fanning them. The Consul stooped forward to the rescue. But the animal bounded just out of reach. He stooped again, with the same result. In this preposterous fashion, the Consul stooping, the cat dancing just out of reach, the insect still flying furiously in the cat's mouth, he approached his porch. Finally the cat extended a preparate paw for the kill, opening her mouth, and the insect, whose wings had never ceased to beat, suddenly and marvellously, flew out as might indeed the human soul from the jaws of death, flew up, up, up, soaring over the trees: and at that moment he saw them. They were standing on the porch: Yvonne's arms were full of bougainvillea, which she was arranging in a cobalt ceramic vase. "--but suppose he's absolutely adamant. Suppose he simply won't go... careful, Hugh, it's got spikes on it, and you have to look at everything carefully to be sure there're no spiders." "Hi there, Suchiquetal!" the Consul shouted gaily, waving his hand, as the cat with a frigid look over her shoulder that said plainly, "I didn't want it anyway; I meant to let it go," galloped away, humiliated, into the bushes. "Hi there, Hugh, you old snake in the gra.s.s!"

... Why then should he be sitting in the bathroom? Was he asleep? dead? pa.s.sed out? Was he in the bathroom now or half an hour ago? Was it night? Where were the others? But now he heard some of the others' voices on the porch. Some of the others? It was just Hugh and Yvonne, of course, for the doctor had gone. Yet for a moment he could have sworn the house had been full of people; why, it was still this morning, or barely afternoon, only 12.15 in fact by his watch. At eleven he'd been talking to Mr Quincey. "Oh... Oh." The Consul groaned aloud... It came to him he was supposed to be getting ready to go to Tomalin. But how had he managed to persuade anyone he was sober enough to go to Tomalin? And why, anyhow, Tomalin?

A procession of thought like little elderly animals filed through the Consul's mind, and in his mind too he was steadily crossing the porch again, as he had done an hour ago, immediately after he'd seen the insect flying away out of the cat's mouth.

He had crossed the porch--which Concepta had swept--smiling soberly to Yvonne and shaking hands with Hugh on his way to the icebox, and unfastening it, he knew not only that they'd been talking about him, but, obscurely, from that bright fragment of overheard conversation, its round meaning, just as had he at that moment glimpsed the new moon with the old one in its arms, he might have been impressed by its complete shape, though the rest were shadowy, illumined only by earthlight.

But what had happened then? "Oh," the Consul cried aloud again. "Oh." The faces of the last hour hovered before him, the figures of Hugh and Yvonne and Dr. Vigil moving quickly and jerkily now like those of an old silent film, their words mute explosions in the brain. n.o.body seemed to be doing anything important; yet everything seemed of the utmost hectic importance, for instance Yvonne saying: "We saw an armadillo"--"What, no Tarsius spectres!" he had replied, then Hugh opening the freezing bottle of Carta Blanca beer for him, prizing off the fizzing cap on the edge of the parapet and decanting the foam into his gla.s.s, the contiguity of which to his strychnine bottle had, it must be admitted now, lost most of its significance...

In the bathroom the Consul became aware he still had with him half a gla.s.s of slightly flat beer; his hand was fairly steady, but numbed holding the gla.s.s, he drank cautiously, carefully postponing the problem soon to be raised by its emptiness.

--"Nonsense," he said to Hugh. And he had added with impressive consular authority that Hugh couldn't leave immediately anyway, at least not for Mexico City, that there was only one bus today, the one Hugh'd come on, which had gone back to the City already, and one train that didn't leave till 11.45 p.m....

Then: "But wasn't it Bougainville, doctor?" Yvonne was asking--and it really was astonishing how sinister and urgent and inflamed all these minutiae seemed to him in the bathroom--"Wasn't it Bougainville who discovered the bougainvillea?" while the doctor bending over her flowers merely looked alert and puzzled, he said nothing save with his eyes which perhaps barely betrayed that he'd stumbled on a "situation."--"Now I come to think of it, I believe it was Bougainville. Hence the name," Hugh observed fatuously, seating himself on the parapet--"Si: you can go to the botica and so as not to be misunderstood, say favor de servir una toma de vino quinado o en su defecto una toma de nuez vomica, pero--" Dr. Vigil was chuckling, talking to Hugh it must have been, Yvonne having slipped into her room a moment, while the Consul, eavesdropping, was at the icebox for another bottle of beer--then; "Oh, I was so terrible sick this morning I needed to be holding myself to the street windows, and to the Consul himself as he returned. "--Please forgive my stupid comport last night: oh, I have done a lot of stupid things everywhere these last few days, but"--raising his gla.s.s of whisky--"I will never drink more; I will need two full days of sleeping to recover myself"--and then, as Yvonne returned--magnificently giving the whole show away, raising his gla.s.s to the Consul again: "Salud: I hope you are not as sick as I am. You were so perfectamente borracho last night I think you must have killed yourself with drinking. I think even to send a boy after you this morning to knock your door, and find if drinking have not killed you already," Dr. Vigil had said.

A strange fellow: in the bathroom the Consul sipped his flat beer. A strange, decent, generous-hearted fellow, if slightly deficient in tact save on his own behalf. Why couldn't people hold their liquor? He himself had still managed to be quite considerate of Vigil's position in Quincey's garden. In the final a.n.a.lysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl. A lonely thought. But of the doctor's generosity there was little doubt. Before long indeed, in spite of the necessary "two full days of sleeping," he had been inviting them all to come with him to Guanajuato: recklessly he proposed leaving for his holiday by car this evening, after a problematic set of tennis this afternoon with-- The Consul took another sip of beer. "Oh," he shuddered. "Oh." It had been a mild shock last night to discover that Vigil and Jacques Laruelle were friends, far more than embarra.s.sing to be reminded of it this morning... Anyhow, Hugh had turned down the notion of the two-hundred-mile trip to Guanajuato, since Hugh--and how amazingly well, after all, those cowboy clothes seemed to suit his erect and careless bearing!--was now determined to catch that night train; while the Consul had declined on Yvonne's account.

The Consul saw himself again, hovering over the parapet, gazing down at the swimming-pool below, a little turquoise set in the garden. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live. The inverted reflections of banana trees and birds, caravans of clouds, moved in it. Wisps of new-mown turf floated on the surface. Fresh mountain water trickled into the pool, which was almost overflowing, from the cracked broken hose whose length was a series of small spouting fountains.

Then Yvonne and Hugh, below, were swimming in the--"Absolutamente," the doctor had said, beside the Consul at the parapet, and attentively lighting a cigarette. "I have," the Consul was telling him, lifting his face towards the volcanoes and feeling his desolation go out to those heights where even now at mid-morning the howling snow would whip the face, and the ground beneath the feet was dead lava, a soulless petrified residue of extinct plasm in which even the wildest and loneliest trees would never take root; "I have another enemy round the back you can't see. A sunflower. I know it watches me and I know it hates me." "Exactamente!" Dr. Vigil said, "very posseebly it might be hating you a little less if you would stop from drinking tequila." "Yes, but I'm only drinking beer this morning," the Consul said with conviction, "as you can see for yourself." "Si, hombre," Dr. Vigil nodded, who after a few whiskies (from a new bottle) had given up trying to conceal himself from Mr Quincey's house and was standing boldly by the parapet with the Consul. "There are," the Consul added, "a thousand aspects of this infernal beauty I was talking about, each with its peculiar tortures, each jealous as a woman of all stimulations save its own." "Naturalmente," Dr. Vigil said. "But I think if you are very serious about your progresion a ratos you may take a longer journey even than this proposed one." The Consul placed his gla.s.s on the parapet while the doctor continued. "Me too unless we contain with ourselves never to drink no more. I think, mi amigo sickness is not only in body but in that part used to be call: soul." "Soul?" "Precisamente," the doctor said, swiftly clasping and unclasping his fingers. "But a mesh? Mesh. The nerves are a mesh, like, how do you say it, an eclectic systeme." "Ah, very good," the Consul said, "you mean an electric system." "But after much tequila the eclectic systeme is perhaps un poco descompuesto, comprenez, as sometimes in the cine: claro?" "A sort of eclampsia, as it were," the Consul nodded desperately, removing his gla.s.ses, and at this point, the Consul remembered, he had been without a drink nearly ten minutes; the effect of the tequila too had almost gone. He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village. Christ, how it heightened the torture (and meantime there had been every reason to suppose the others imagined he was enjoying himself enormously) to be aware of all this, while at the same time conscious of the whole horrible disintegrating mechanism, the light now on, now off, now on too glaringly, now too dimly, with the glow of a fitful dying battery--then at last to know the whole town plunged into darkness, where communication is lost, motion mere obstruction, bombs threaten, ideas stampede-- The Consul had now finished his gla.s.s of flat beer. He sat gazing at the bathroom wall in an att.i.tude like a grotesque parody of an old att.i.tude in meditation. "I am very much interested in insanes." That was a strange way to start a conversation with a fellow who'd just stood you a drink. Yet that was precisely how the doctor, in the Bella Vista bar, had started their conversation the previous night. Could it be Vigil considered his practised eye had detected approaching insanity (and this was funny too, recalling his thoughts on the subject earlier, to conceive of it as merely approaching) as some who have watched wind and weather all their lives can prophesy, under a fair sky, the approaching storm, the darkness that will come galloping out of nowhere across the fields of the mind? Not that there could be said to be a very fair sky either in that connexion. Yet how interested would the doctor have been in one who felt himself being shattered by the very forces of the universe? What cataplasms have laid on his soul? What did even the hierophants of science know of the fearful potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil? The Consul wouldn't have needed a practised eye to detect on this wall, or any other, a Mene-Tekel-Peres for the world, compared to which mere insanity was a drop in the bucket. Yet who would ever have believed that some obscure man, sitting at the centre of the world in a bathroom, say, thinking solitary miserable thoughts, was authoring their doom, that, even while he was thinking, it was as if behind the scenes certain strings were being pulled, and whole continents burst into flame, and calamity moved nearer--just as now, at this moment perhaps, with a sudden jolt and grind, calamity had moved nearer, and, without the Consul's knowing it, outside the sky had darkened. Or perhaps it was not a man at all, but a child, a little child, innocent as that other Geoffrey had been, who sat as up in an organ loft somewhere playing, pulling out all the stops at random, and kingdoms divided and fell, and abominations dropped from the sky--a child innocent as that infant sleeping in the coffin which had slanted past them down the Calle Tierra del Fuego...

The Consul lifted his gla.s.s to his lips, tasted its emptiness again, then set it on the floor, still wet from the feet of the swimmers. The uncontrollable mystery on the bathroom floor. He remembered that the next time he had returned to the porch with a bottle of Carta Blanca, though for some reason this now seemed a terribly long time ago, in the past--it was as if something he could not put his finger on had mysteriously supervened to separate drastically that returning figure from himself sitting in the bathroom (the figure on the porch, for all its d.a.m.nation, seemed younger, to have more freedom of movement, choice, to have, if only because it held a full gla.s.s of beer once more, a better chance of a future)--Yvonne, youthful and pretty-looking in her white satin bathing-suit, had been wandering on tiptoe round the doctor, who was saying: "Senora Firmin, I am really disappoint though you cannot come me with."

The Consul and she had exchanged a look of understanding, it almost amounted to, then Yvonne was swimming again, below, and the doctor was saying to the Consul: "Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills."

"Guanajuato," the doctor was saying, "you will not believe me, how she can lie there, like the old golden jewel on the breast of our grandmother."

"Guanajuato," Dr. Vigil said, "the streets. How can you resist the names of the streets? Street of Kisses. Street of Singing Frogs. The Street of the Little Head. Is not that revolting?"

"Repellent," the Consul said. "Isn't Guanajuato the place they bury everybody standing up?"--ah, and this was where he had remembered about the bullthrowing and, feeling a return of energy, had called down to Hugh, who was sitting thoughtfully by the edge of the pool in the Consul's swimming-trunks. "Tomalin's quite near Parian, where your pal was going," he said. "We might even go on there." And then to the doctor, "Perhaps you might come too... I left my favourite pipe in Parian. Which I might get back, with luck. In the Farolito." And the doctor had said: "Wheee, es un infierno," while Yvonne, lifting up a corner of her bathing-cap to hear better, said meekly, "Not a bullfight?" And the Consul: "No, a bullthrowing. If you're not too tired?"

But the doctor could not of course come to Tomalin with them, though this was never discussed, since just then the conversation was violently interrupted by a sudden terrific detonation, that shook the house and sent birds skimming panic-stricken all over the garden. Target practice in the Sierra Madre. The Consul had been half aware of it in his sleep earlier. Puffs of smoke were drifting high over the rocks below Popo at the end of the valley. Three black vultures came tearing through the trees low over the roof with soft hoa.r.s.e cries like the cries of love. Driven at unaccustomed speed by their fear they seemed almost to capsize, keeping close together but balancing at different angles to avoid collision. Then they sought another tree to wait in and the echoes of gunfire swept back over the house, soaring higher and higher and growing fainter while somewhere a clock was striking nineteen. Twelve o'clock, and the Consul said to the doctor: "Ah, that the dream of the dark magician in his visioned cave, even while his hand--that's the bit I like--shakes in its last decay, were the true end of this so lovely world. Jesus. Do you know, companero, I sometimes have the feeling that it's actually sinking, like Atlantis, beneath my feet. Down, down to the frightful 'poulps.' Meropis of Theopompus... And the ignivoma mountains." And the doctor who was nodding gloomily said: "Si, that is tequila. Hombre, un poco de cerveza, un poco de vino, but never no more tequila. Never no more mescal." And then the doctor was whispering: "But hombre, now that your esposa has come back." (It seemed that Dr. Vigil had said this several times, only with a different look on his face: "But hombre, now that your esposa has come back.") And then he was going: "I did not need to be inquisitive to be knowing you might have wished my advice. No hombre, as I say last night, I am not so interested in moneys.--Con permiso, the plaster he no good." A little shower of plaster had, indeed, rained down on the doctor's head. Then: "Hasta la vista" "Adios" "Muchas gracias" "Thank you so much" "Sorry we couldn't come" "Have a good time," from the swimming-pool. "Hasta la vista" again, then silence.

And now the Consul was in the bathroom getting ready to go to Tomalin. "Oh..." he said, "Oh..." But, you see, nothing so dire has happened after all. First to wash. Sweating and trembling again, he took off his coat and shirt. He had turned on the water in the basin. Yet for some obscure reason he was standing under the shower, waiting in an agony for the shock of cold water that never came. And he was still wearing his trousers.

The Consul sat helplessly in the bathroom, watching the insects which lay at different angles from one another on the wall, like ships out in the roadstead. A caterpillar started to wriggle toward him, peering this way and that, with interrogatory antennae. A large cricket, with polished fuselage, clung to the curtain, swaying it slightly and cleaning its face like a cat, its eyes on stalks appearing to revolve in its head. He turned, expecting the caterpillar to be much nearer, but it too had turned, just slightly shifting its moorings. Now a scorpion was moving slowly across towards him. Suddenly the Consul rose, trembling in every limb. But it wasn't the scorpion he cared about. It was that, all at once, the thin shadows of isolated nails, the stains of murdered mosquitoes, the very scars and cracks of the wall, had begun to swarm, so that, wherever he looked, another insect was born, wriggling instantly toward his heart. It was as if, and, this was what was most appalling, the whole insect world had somehow moved nearer and now was closing, rushing in upon him. For a moment the bottle of tequila at the bottom of the garden gleamed on his soul, then the Consul stumbled into his bedroom.

Here there was no longer that terrible visible swarming, yet--lying now on the bed--it still seemed to persist in his mind, much as the vision of the dead man earlier had persisted, a kind of seething, from which, as from the persistent rolling of drums heard by some great dying monarch, occasionally a half-recognizable voice dissociated itself: --Stop it, for G.o.d's sake, you fool. Watch your step. We can't help you any more.

--I would like the privilege of helping you, of your friendship. I would work you with. I do not care a d.a.m.n for moneys anyway.

--What, is this you, Geoffrey? Don't you remember me? Your old friend, Abe. What have you done, my boy?

--Ha ha, you're for it now. Straightened out--in a coffin! Yeah.

--My son, my son!

--My lover. Oh come to me again as once in May.

6.

--Nel mezzo del b.l.o.o.d.y cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in... Hugh flung himself down on the porch daybed.

A strong warm gusty wind howled over the garden. Refreshed by his swim and a lunch of turkey sandwiches, the cigar Geoff had given him earlier partially shielded by the parapet, he lay watching the clouds speeding across the Mexican skies. How fast they went, how far too fast! In the middle of our life, in the middle of the b.l.o.o.d.y road of our life...

Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto a.s.sociated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young for ever--that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, pa.s.sing so swiftly today's cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zocalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it-- Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio ("I am none of these things really." "I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt." "I am no worse than anybody else..."); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. At least they would take his mind from Yvonne for a time, if they only led back to her in the end. Even Juan Cerillo failed him now, as did, at this moment, San Antonio: two Mexican voices on different wavelengths were breaking in. For everything you have done up to now has been dishonest, the first might have been saying. What about the way you treated poor old Bolowski, the music publisher, remember his shabby little shop in Old Compton Street, off the Tottenham Court Road? Even what you persuade yourself is the best thing about you, your pa.s.sion for helping the Jews, has some basis in a dishonourable action of your own. Small wonder, since he so charitably forgave you, that you forgave him his skulduggery, to the point of being prepared to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself... No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? said Hugh...

The seagull--pure scavenger of the empyrean, hunter of edible stars--I rescued that day as a boy when it was caught in a fence on the cliffside and was beating itself to death, blinded by snow, and though it attacked me, I drew it out unharmed, with one hand by its feet, and for one magnificent moment held it up in the sunlight, before it soared away on angelic wings over the freezing estuary?

The artillery started blasting away in the foothills again. A train hooted somewhere, like an approaching steamer; perhaps the very train Hugh'd be taking tonight. From the bottom of the swimming-pool below a reflected small sun blazed and nodded among the inverted papayas. Reflections of vultures a mile deep wheeled upside down and were gone. A bird, quite close really, seemed to be moving in a series of jerks across the glittering summit of Popocatepetl--the wind, in fact, had dropped, which was as well for his cigar. The radio had gone dead too, and Hugh gave it up, settling himself back on the daybed.

Not even the seagull was the answer of course. The seagull had been spoilt already by his dramatizing it. Nor yet the poor little hot-dog man. That bitter December night he had met him trudging down Oxford Street with his new wagon--the first hot-dog wagon in London, and he had been pushing it around for a whole month without selling a single hot dog. Now with a family to support and Christmas approaching he was on his uppers. Shades of Charles d.i.c.kens! It was perhaps the newness of the wretched wagon he'd been cozened into buying that seemed so awful. But how could he expect, Hugh asked him, as above them the monstrous deceptions twitched on and off, and around them the black soulless buildings stood wrapped in a cold dream of their own destruction (they had halted by a church from whose sooty wall a figure of Christ on the cross had been removed leaving only the scar and the legend: Is it nothing to you all ye who pa.s.s by?) how could he expect to sell anything so revolutionary as a hot dog in Oxford Street? He might as well try ice-cream at the South Pole. No, the idea was to camp outside a pub down a back alley, and that not any pub, but the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, chock full of starving artists drinking themselves to death simply because their souls pined away, each night between eight and ten, for lack of just such a thing as a hot dog. That was the place to go!

And--not even the hot-dog man was the answer; even though by Christmas time, obviously, he had been doing a roaring trade outside the Fitzroy. Hugh suddenly sat up, scattering cigar-ash everywhere.--And yet is it nothing I am beginning to atone, to atone for my past, so largely negative, selfish, absurd, and dishonest? That I propose to sit on top of a shipload of dynamite bound for the hard-pressed Loyalist armies? Nothing that after all I am willing to give my life for humanity, if not in minute particulars? Nothing to ye that pa.s.s by?... Though what on earth he expected it to be, if none of his friends knew he was going to do it, was not very clear. So far as the Consul was concerned, he probably suspected him of something even more reckless. And it had to be admitted, one was not altogether averse to this, if it had not prevented the Consul from still hinting uncomfortably close to the truth, that the whole stupid beauty of such a decision made by anyone at a time like this, must lie in that it was so futile, that it was too late, that the Loyalists had already lost, and that should that person emerge safe and sound, no one would be able to say to him that he had been carried away by the popular wave of enthusiasm for Spain, when even the Russians had given up, and the Internationals withdrawn. But death and truth could rhyme at a pinch. There was the old dodge too of telling anyone who shook the dust of the City of Destruction from his feet, he was running away from himself and his responsibilities. But the useful thought struck Hugh: I have no responsibilities. And how can I be escaping from myself when I am without a place on earth? No home. A piece of driftwood on the Indian Ocean. Is India my home? Disguise myself as an untouchable, which should not be so difficult, and go to prison on the Andaman Islands for seventy-seven years, until England gives India her freedom? But I will tell you this: you would only by doing so be embarra.s.sing Mahatma Gandhi, secretly the only public figure in the world for whom you have any respect. No, I respect Stalin too, Cardenas, and Jawaharlal Nehru--all three of whom probably could only be embarra.s.sed by my respect.--Hugh had another shot at San Antonio.

The radio came alive with a vengeance; at the Texan station news of a flood was being delivered with such rapidity one gained the impression the commentator himself was in danger of drowning. Another narrator in a higher voice gabbled bankruptcy, disaster, while yet another told of misery blanketing a threatened capital, people stumbling through debris littering dark streets, hurrying thousands seeking shelter in bomb-torn darkness. How well he knew the jargon. Darkness, disaster! How the world fed on it. In the war to come correspondents would a.s.sume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement. A bawling scream abruptly warned of stocks lower, or irregularly higher, the prices of grain, cotton, metal, munitions. While static rattled on eternally below--poltergeists of the ether, claquers of the idiotic! Hugh inclined his ear to the pulse of this world beating in that latticed throat, whose voice was now pretending to be horrified at the very thing by which it proposed to be engulfed the first moment it could be perfectly certain the engulfing process would last long enough. Impatiently switching the dial around, Hugh thought he heard Joe Venuti's violin suddenly, the joyous little lark of discursive melody soaring in some remote summer of its own above all this abyssal fury, yet furious too, with the wild controlled abandon of that music which still sometimes seemed to him the happiest thing about America. Probably they were rebroadcasting some ancient record, one of those with the poetical names like Little b.u.t.tercup or Apple Blossom, and it was curious how much it hurt, as though this music, never outgrown, belonged irretrievably to that which had today at last been lost. Hugh switched the radio off, and lay, cigar between his fingers, staring at the porch ceiling.

Joe Venuti had not been the same, one heard, since Ed Lang died. The latter suggested guitars, and if Hugh ever wrote, as he often threatened to do, his autobiography, though it would have been rather unnecessary, his life being one of those that perhaps lent themselves better to such brief summation in magazines as "So and so is twenty-nine, has been riveter, song-writer, watcher of manholes, stoker, sailor, riding instructor, variety artist, bandsman, bacon-scrubber, saint, clown, soldier (for five minutes), and usher in a spiritualist church, from which it should not always be a.s.sumed that far from having acquired through his experiences a wider view of existence, he has a somewhat narrower notion of it than any bank clerk who has never set foot outside Newcastle-under-Lyme,"--but if he ever wrote it, Hugh reflected, he would have to admit that a guitar made a pretty important symbol in his life.

He had not played one, and Hugh could play almost any kind of guitar, for four or five years, and his numerous instruments declined with his books in bas.e.m.e.nts or attics in London or Paris, in Wardour Street night-clubs or behind the bar of the Marquis of Granby or the old Astoria in Greek Street, long since become a convent and his bill still unpaid there, in p.a.w.nshops in t.i.thebarn Street or the Tottenham Court Road, where he imagined them as waiting for a time with all their sounds and echoes for his heavy step, and then, little by little, as they gathered dust, and each successive string broke, giving up hope, each string a hawser to the fading memory of their friend, snapping off, the highest pitched string always first, snapping with sharp gun-like reports, or curious agonized whines, or provocative nocturnal meows, like a nightmare in the soul of George Frederic Watts, till there was nothing but the blank untumultuous face of the songless lyre itself, soundless cave for spiders and steamflies, and delicate fretted neck, just as each breaking string had severed Hugh himself pang by pang from his youth, while the past remained, a tortured shape, dark and palpable and accusing. Or the guitars would have been stolen many times by now, or resold, rep.a.w.ned--inherited by some other master perhaps, as if each were some great thought or doctrine. These sentiments, he was almost diverted to think, were possibly more suited to some exiled dying Segovia than to a mere ex-hot-guitarist. But Hugh, if he could not play quite like Django Reinhardt or Eddie Lang on the one hand or, G.o.d help him, Frank Crumit on the other, could not help remembering either that he had once enjoyed the reputation of a tremendous talent. It was in an odd sense spurious, this reputation, like so much else about him, his greatest hits having been made with a tenor guitar tuned as a ukulele and played virtually as a percussion instrument. Yet that in this bizarre manner he had become the magician of commotions mistakable for anything from the Scotch Express to elephants trampling in moonlight, an old Allophone rhythm cla.s.sic (ent.i.tled, tersely, Juggernaut) testified to this day. At all events, he thought, his guitar had probably been the least fake thing about him. And fake or not one had certainly been behind most of the major decisions of his life. For it was due to a guitar he'd become a journalist, it was due to a guitar he had become a songwriter, it was largely owing to a guitar even--and Hugh felt himself suffused by a slow burning flush of shame--that he had first gone to sea.

Hugh had started writing songs at school and before he was seventeen, at about the same time he lost his innocence, also after several attempts, two numbers of his were accepted by the Jewish firm of Lazarus Bolowski and Sons in New Compton Street, London. His method was each whole holiday to make the rounds of the music publishers with his guitar--and in this respect his early life vaguely recalled that of another frustrated artist, Adolf Hider--his ma.n.u.scripts transcribed for piano alone in the guitar case, or another old Gladstone bag of Geoff's. This success in the tin-pan alleys of England overwhelmed him; almost before his aunt knew what was afoot he was leaving school on the strength of it with her permission. At this school, where he sub-edited the magazine, he got on erratically; he told himself that he hated it for the sn.o.bbish ideals prevailing there. There was a certain amount of anti-Semitism; and Hugh, whose heart was easily touched, had, though popular for his guitar, chosen Jews as his particular friends and favoured them in his columns. He was already entered at Cambridge for a year or so hence. He had not, however, the slightest intention of going there. The prospect of it, for some reason, he dreaded only less than being stuck meantime at some crammer's. And to prevent this he must act swiftly. As he naively saw it, through his songs there was an excellent chance of rendering himself completely independent, which also meant independent in advance of the income that four years later he was to begin receiving from the Public Trustees, independent of everybody, and without the dubious benefit of a degree.

But his success was already beginning to wear off a little. For one thing a premium was required (his aunt had paid the premium) and the songs themselves were not to be published for several months. And it struck him, more than prophetically as it happened, that these songs alone, while both of the requisite thirty-two bars, of an equal ba.n.a.lity, and even faintly touched with moronism--Hugh later became so ashamed of their tides that to this day he kept them locked in, a secret drawer of his mind--might be insufficient to do the trick. Weil, he had other songs, the tides to some of which, Susquehanna Mammy, Slumbering Wabash, Mississippi Sunset, Dismal Swamp , etc., were perhaps revelatory, and that of one at least, I'm Homesick for Being Homesick (of being homesick for home), Vocal Fox Trot, profound, if not positively Wordsworthian...

But all this seemed to belong in the future. Bolowski had hinted he might take them if... And Hugh did not wish to offend him by trying to sell them elsewhere. Not that there were many other publishers left to try! But perhaps, perhaps, if these two songs did make a great hit, sold enormously, made Bolowski's fortune, perhaps if some great publicity-- Some great publicity! This was it, this was always it, something sensational was needed, it was the cry of the times, and when that day he had presented himself at the Marine Superintendent's office in Garston-Garston because Hugh's aunt moved from London north to Oswaldtwistle in the spring--to sign on board the S.S. Philoctetes he was at least certain something sensational had been found. Oh, Hugh saw, it was a grotesque and pathetic picture enough, that of the youth who imagined himself a cross between Bix Beiderbecke, whose first records had just appeared in England, the infant Mozart, and the childhood of Raleigh, signing on the dotted line in the office; and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then, The Sea Wolf , and now in 1938 he had advanced to the virile Valley of the Moon (his favourite was The Jacket ), and perhaps after all he did genuinely love the sea, and the nauseous overrated expanse was his only love, the only woman of whom his future wife need be jealous, perhaps all these things were true of that youth, glimpsing probably, too, from afar, beyond the clause Seamen and Firemen mutually to a.s.sist each other, the promise of unlimited delight in the brothels of the Orient--an illusion, to say the least: but what unfortunately almost robbed it all of any vestige of the heroic was that in order to gain his ends without, so to say, "conscience or consideration," Hugh had previously visited every newspaper office within a radius of thirty miles, and most of the big London dailies had branch offices in that part of the north, and informed them precisely of his intention to sail on the Philoctetes , counting on the prominence of his family, remotely "news" even in England since the mystery of his father's disappearance, together with his tale of his songs' acceptance--he announced boldly that all were t