Under The Volcano Part 7

Yet he felt trapped. The more completely for the realization that in no essential sense had he escaped from his past life. It was all here, though in another form: the same conflicts, faces, same people, he could imagine, as at school, the same spurious popularity with his guitar, the same kind of unpopularity because he made friends with the stewards, or worse, with the Chinese firemen. Even the ship looked like a fantastic mobile football field. Anti-Semitism, it is true, he had left behind, for Jews on the whole had more sense than to go to sea. But if he had expected to leave British sn.o.bbery astern with his public school he was sadly mistaken. In fact, the degree of sn.o.bbery prevailing on the Philoctetes was fantastic, of a kind Hugh had never imagined possible. The chief cook regarded the tireless second cook as a creature of completely inferior station. The bosun despised the carpenter and would not speak to him for three months, though they messed in the same small room, because he was a tradesman, while the carpenter despised the bosun since he, Chips, was the senior petty officer. The chief steward, who affected striped shirts off duty, was clearly contemptuous of the cheerful second, who, refusing to take his calling seriously, was content with a singlet and a sweat-rag. When the youngest apprentice went ash.o.r.e for a swim with a towel round his neck he was solemnly rebuked by a quartermaster wearing a tie without a collar for being a disgrace to the ship. And the captain himself nearly turned black in the face each time he saw Hugh because, intending a compliment, Hugh had described the Philoctetes in an interview as a tramp. Tramp or no, the whole ship rolled and weltered in bourgeois prejudices and taboos the like of which Hugh had not known even existed. Or so it seemed to him. It is wrong, though, to say she rolled. Hugh, far from aspiring to be a Conrad, as the papers suggested, had not then read a word of him. But he was vaguely aware Conrad hinted somewhere that in certain seasons typhoons were to be expected along the China coast. This was such a season; here, eventually, was the China coast. Yet there seemed no typhoons. Or if there were the Philoctetes was careful to avoid them. From the time she emerged from the Bitter Lakes till she lay in the roads at Yokohama a dead monotonous calm prevailed. Hugh chipped rust through the bitter watches. Only they were not really bitter; nothing happened. And they were not watches; he was a day worker. Still, he had to pretend to himself, poor fellow, there was something romantic in what he had done. As was there not! He might easily have consoled himself by looking at a map. Unfortunately maps also too vividly suggested school. So that going through the Suez he was not conscious of sphinxes, Ismailia, nor Mt Sinai; nor through the Red Sea, of Hejaz, Asir, Yemen. Because Perim belonged to India while so remote from it, that island had always fascinated him. Yet they stood off the terrible place a whole forenoon without his grasping the fact. An Italian Somaliland stamp with wild herdsmen on it was once his most treasured possession. They pa.s.sed Guardafui without his realizing this any more than when as a child of three he'd sailed by in the opposite direction. Later he did not think of Cape Comorin, or Nicobar. Nor, in the Gulf of Siam, of Pnom-Penh. Maybe he did not know himself what he thought about; bells struck, the engine thrummed; videre; videre; and far above was perhaps another sea, where the soul ploughed its high invisible wake-- Certainly Sokotra only became a symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have pa.s.sed within figurative hailing distance of his birthplace never occurred to him... Hong Kong, Shanghai; but the opportunities to get ash.o.r.e were few and far between, the little money there was they could never touch, and after having lain at Yokohama a full month without one sh.o.r.e leave Hugh's cup of bitterness was full. Yet where permission had been granted instead of roaring in bars the men merely sat on board sewing and telling the dirty jokes Hugh had heard at the age of eleven. Or they engaged in loutish neuter compensations. Hugh had not escaped the Pharisaism of his English elders either. There was a good library on board, however, and under the tutelage of the lamp-trimmer Hugh began the education with which an expensive public school had failed to provide him. He read the Forsyte Saga and Peer Gynt . It was largely owing to the lamp-trimmer too, a kindly quasi-Communist, who normally spent his watch below studying a pamphlet named the Red Hand, that Hugh gave up his notion of dodging Cambridge. "If I were you I'd go to the poxing place. Get what you b.l.o.o.d.y can out of the set-up."

Meanwhile his reputation had followed him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the Singapore Free Press might read "Murder of Brother-in-Law's Concubine" it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some such pa.s.sage as: "A curly-headed boy stood on the fo'c'sle head of the Philoctetes as she docked in Penang strumming his latest composition on the ukelele." News which any day now would turn up in j.a.pan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from Singing the Blues, he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress. He certainly didn't think of any other mistresses he might have had at home. His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long ago. A tender smile of Mrs Bolowski's, flashed in dark New Compton Street, had haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the advertis.e.m.e.nts for music halls up north. Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly 6.30, 8.30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis b.a.l.l.s on crisp turf, and their swift pa.s.sage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea (despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the Philoctetes ), the recently acquired taste for good English ale and old cheese...

But above all there were his songs, which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel, having gone through h.e.l.l, through "fire"--and Hugh persuaded himself such really was the case--he had earned as his right and reward.

But the time came when Hugh did go through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the Oedipus Tyrannus , whose namesake the lamp-trimmer of the Philoctetes might have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote, yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this seemed about to happen, on the Philoctetes's p.o.o.p all was excitement, then as the vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a megaphone: "Give Captain Telson Captain Sanderson's compliments, and tell him he's been given a foul berth!"

The Oedipus Tyrannus, which, unlike the Philoctetes, carried white firemen, had been away from home the incredible period of fourteen months. For this reason her ill-used skipper was by no means so anxious as Hugh's to deny his ship was a tramp. Twice now the Rock of Gibraltar had loomed on his starboard bow only to presage not Thames, or Mersey, but the Western Ocean, the long trip to New York. And then Vera Cruz and Colon, Vancouver and the long voyage over the Pacific back to the Far East. And now, just as everyone was feeling certain this time at last they were to go home, he had been ordered to New York once more. Her crew, especially the firemen, were weary to death of this state of affairs. The next morning, as the two ships rode again at a gracious distance, a notice appeared in the Philoctetes's after messroom calling for volunteers to replace three seamen and four firemen of the Oedipus Tyrannus. These men would thus be enabled to return to England with the Philoctetes, which had been at sea only three months, but within the week on leaving Yokohama would be homeward bound.

Now at sea more days are more dollars, however few. And at sea likewise three months is a terribly long while. But fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an eternity. It was not likely that the Oedipus Tyrannus would face more than another six of vagrancy: then one never knew; it might be the idea gradually to transfer her more long-suffering hands to homegoing vessels when she contacted them and keep her wandering two more years. At the end of two days there were only two volunteers, a wireless watcher and an ordinary seaman.

Hugh looked at the Oedipus Tyrannus in her new berth, but swinging again rebelliously close, as to the tether of his mind, the old steamer appearing now on one quarter, now on another, one moment near the breakwater, the next running out to sea. She was, unlike the Philoctetes, everything in his eyes a ship should be. First she was not in rig a football boat, a ma.s.s of low goalposts and trank.u.ms. Her masts and derricks were of the lofty coffee-pot variety. These former were black, of iron. Her funnel too was tall, and needed paint. She was foul and rusty, red lead showed along her side. She had a marked list to port, and, who knows, one to starboard as well. The condition of her bridge suggested recent contact--could it be possible?--with a typhoon. If not, she possessed the air of one who would soon attract them. She was battered, ancient, and, happy thought, perhaps even about to sink. And yet there was something youthful and beautiful about her, like an illusion that will never die, but always remains hull-down on the horizon. It was said she was capable of seven knots. And she was going to New York! On the other hand should he sign on her, what became of England? He was not so absurdly sanguine about his songs as to imagine his fame so bright there after two years... Besides, it would mean a terrible readjustment, starting all over again. Still, there could not be the same stigma attaching to him on board. His name would scarcely have reached Colon. Ah, his brother Geoff, too, knew these seas, these pastures of experience, what would he have done?

But he couldn't do it. Galled as he was lying a month at Yokohama without sh.o.r.e leave it was still asking too much. It was as if at school, just as the end of term beautifully came in sight, he had been told there would be no summer holidays, he must go on working as usual through August and September. Save that no one was telling him anything. Some inner self, merely, was urging him to volunteer so that another sea-weary man, homesick longer than he, might take his place. Hugh signed on board the Oedipus Tyrannus.

When he returned to the Philoctetes a month later in Singapore he was a different man. He had dysentery. The Oedipus Tyrannus had not disappointed him. Her food was poor. No refrigeration, simply an icebox. And a chief steward (the dirty wog) who sat all day in his cabin smoking cigarettes. The fo'c'sle was forward too. He left her against his will however, due to an agential confusion, and with nothing in his mind of Lord Jim, about to pick up pilgrims going to Mecca. New York had been shelved, his shipmates, if not all the pilgrims would probably reach home after all. Alone with his pain off duty Hugh felt a sorry fellow. Yet every now and then he rose on his elbow: my G.o.d what a life! No conditions could be too good for the men tough enough to endure it. Not even the ancient Egyptians knew what slavery was. Though what did he know about it?

Not much. The bunkers, loaded at Miki--a black coaling port calculated to fulfil any landsman's conception of a sailor's dreams, since every house in it was a brothel, every woman a prost.i.tute, including even an old hag who did tattoos--were soon full: the coal was near the stokehold floor. He had seen, only the bright side of a trimmer's job, if it could be said to have one. But was it much better on deck? Not really. No pity there either. To the sailor life at sea was no senseless publicity stunt.

It was dead serious. Hugh was horribly ashamed of ever having so exploited it. Years of crashing dullness, of exposure to every kind of obscure peril and disease, your destiny at the mercy of a company interested in your health only because it might have to pay your insurance, your home-life reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen months, that was the sea. That, and a secret longing to be buried in it. And an enormous unquenchable pride. Hugh now thought he realized dimly what the lamp-trimmer had tried to explain, why he had been alternately abused and toadied to on the Philoctetes.

It was largely because he had foolishly advertised himself as the representative of a heartless system both distrusted and feared.

Yet to seamen this system offers far greater inducement than to firemen, who rarely emerge through the hawsehole into the bourgeois upper air. Nevertheless, it remains suspect. Its ways are devious. Its spies are everywhere. It will wheedle to you, who can tell, even on a guitar. For this reason its diary must be read. One must check up, keep abreast of its deviltries. One must, if necessary, flatter it, ape it, seem to collaborate with it.

And it, in turn, flatters you. It yields a point here and there, in matters such as food, better living conditions, even though it has first destroyed the peace of mind necessary to benefit by them, libraries. For in this manner it keeps a stranglehold on your soul. And because of this it sometimes happens you grow obsequious and find yourself saying: "Do you know, you are working for us, when we should be working for you?" That is right too.

The system is working for you, as you will shortly discover, when the next war comes, bringing jobs for all. "But don't imagine you can get away with these tricks for ever," you are repeating all the time in your heart; "Actually we have you in our grip. Without us in peace or war Christendom must collapse like a heap of ashes!" Hugh saw holes in the logic of this thought. Nevertheless, on board the Oedipus Tyrannus, almost without taint of that symbol, Hugh had been neither abused nor toadied to. He had been treated as a comrade. And generously helped, when unequal to his task. Only four weeks. Yet those weeks with the Oedipus Tyrannus had reconciled him to the Philoctetes. Thus he became bitterly concerned that so long as he stayed sick someone else must do his job. When he turned to again before he was well he still dreamed of England and fame. But he was mainly occupied with finishing his work in style. During these last hard weeks he played his guitar seldom. It seemed he was getting along splendidly. So splendidly that, before docking, his shipmates insisted on packing his bag for him. As it turned out, with stale bread.

They lay at Gravesend waiting for the tide. Around them in the misty dawn sheep were already bleating softly. The Thames, in the half-light, seemed not unlike the Yangtze-Kiang. Then, suddenly, someone knocked out his pipe on a garden wall...

Hugh hadn't waited to discover whether the journalist who came aboard at Silvertown liked to play his songs in his spare time. He'd almost thrown him bodily off the ship.

Whatever prompted the ungenerous act did not prevent his somehow finding his way that night to New Compton Street and Bolowski's shabby little shop. Closed now and dark: but Hugh could almost be certain those were his songs in the window. How strange it all was! Almost he fancied he heard familiar chords from above--Mrs Bolowski practising them softly in an upper room. And later, seeking a hotel, that all around him people were humming them. That night too, in the Astoria, this humming persisted in his dreams; he rose at dawn to investigate once more the wonderful window. Neither of his songs was there. Hugh was only disappointed an instant. Probably his songs were so popular no copies could be spared for display.

Nine o'clock brought him again to Bolowski's. The little man was delighted to see him. Yes, indeed, both his songs had been published a considerable time. Bolowski would go and get them. Hugh waited breathlessly. Why was he away so long? After all, Bolowski was his publisher. It could not be, surely, he was having any difficulty finding them. At last Bolowski and an a.s.sistant returned with two enormous packages. "Here," he said, "are your songs. What would you like us to do with them? Would you like to take them? Or would you like us to keep them a while longer?"

And there, indeed, were Hugh's songs. They had been published, a thousand sheets of each, as Bolowski said: that was all. No effort had been made to distribute them. n.o.body was humming them. No comedian was singing them at the Birkenhead Hippodrome. No one had ever heard a word more of the songs "the schoolboy undergraduate" had written. And so far as Bolowski was concerned it was a matter of complete indifference whether anyone heard a word more in the future. He had printed them, thus fulfilling his part of the contract. It had cost him perhaps a third of the premium. The rest was clear profit. If Bolowski published a thousand such songs a year by the unsuspecting half-wits willing to pay why go to the expense of pushing them? The premiums alone were his justification. And after all, Hugh had his songs. Hadn't he known, Bolowski gently explained, there was no market for songs by English composers? That most of the songs published were American? Hugh in spite of himself felt flattered at being initiated into the mysteries of the song-writing business. "But all the publicity," he stammered, "wasn't all that good advertising for you?" And Bolowski gently shook his head. That story had gone dead before the songs were published. "Yet it would be easy to revive it?--" Hugh muttered, swallowing all his complicated good intentions as he remembered the reporter he'd kicked off the ship the day before: then, ashamed, he tried another tack... Maybe, after all, one might stand more chance in America as a song-writer? And he thought, remotely of the Oedipus Tyrannus. But Bolowski quietly scoffed at one's chances in America; there, where every waiter was a song-writer-- All this while, though, Hugh had been half-hopefully glancing over his songs. At least his name was on the covers. And on one was actually the photograph of a dance-band. Featured with enormous success by Izzy Smigalkin and his orchestra! Taking several copies of each he returned to the Astoria. Izzy Smigalkin was playing at the Elephant and Castle and thither he bent his steps, why he could not have said, since Bolowski had already implied the truth, that even had Izzy Smigalkin been playing at the Kilburn Empire itself he was still not the fellow to prove interested in any songs for which band parts had not been issued, be he featuring them by obscure arrangement through Bolowski with never so much success. Hugh became aware of the world.

He pa.s.sed his exam to Cambridge but scarcely left his old haunts. Eighteen months must elapse before he went up. The reporter he'd thrown off the Philoctetes had said to him, whatever his point: "You're a fool. You could have every editor in town running after you." Chastened, Hugh found through this same man a job on a newspaper pasting cuttings in a sc.r.a.p book. So it had come to this! However he soon acquired some sense of independence--though his board was paid by his aunt. And his rise was rapid. His notoriety had helped, albeit he wrote nothing so far of the sea. At bottom he desired honesty, art, and his story of a brothel burning in Wapping Old Stairs was said to embrace both. But at the back of his mind other fires were smouldering. No longer did he grub around from shady publisher to publisher with his guitar and his ma.n.u.scripts in Geoff's Gladstone bag. Yet his life once more began to bear a certain resemblance to Adolf Hitler's. He had not lost touch with Bolowski, and in his heart he imagined himself plotting revenge. A form of private anti-Semitism became part of his life. He sweated racial hatred in the night. If it still sometimes struck him that in the stokehold he had fallen down the spout of the capitalist system, that feeling was now inseparable from his loathing of the Jews. It was somehow the fault of the poor old Jews, not merely Bolowski, but all Jews, that he'd found himself down the stokehold in the first place on a wild-goose chase. It was even due to the Jews that such economic excrescences as the British Mercantile Marine existed. In his day dreams he became the instigator of enormous pogroms--all-inclusive, and hence, bloodless. And daily he moved nearer his design. True, between it and him, from time to time rose up the shadow of the Philoctetes's lamp-trimmer. Or flickered the shadows of the trimmers in the Oedipus Tyrannus. Were not Bolowski and his ilk the enemies of their own race and the Jews themselves the cast-out, exploited, and wandering of the earth, even as they, even, once, as he? But what was the brotherhood of man when your brothers put stale bread in your sea-bag? Still, where else to turn for some decent and clear values? Had his father or mother not died perhaps? His aunt? Geoff? But Geoff, like some ghostly other self, was always in Rabat or Timbuctoo. Besides he'd deprived him once already of the dignity of being a rebel. Hugh smiled as he lay on the daybed.... For there had been someone, he now saw, to whose memory at least he might have turned. It reminded him moreover that he'd been an ardent revolutionary for a while at the age of thirteen. And, odd to recall, was it not this same Headmaster of his former prep school, and Scoutmaster, Dr. Gotelby, fabulous stalking totem pole of Privilege, the Church, the English gentleman--G.o.d save the King and sheet anchor of parents, who'd been responsible for his heresy? Goat old boy! With admirable independence the fiery old fellow, who preached the virtues each Sunday in Chapel, had ill.u.s.trated to his goggling history cla.s.s how the Bolshevists, far from being the child murderers in the Daily Mail, followed a way of life only less splendid than that current throughout his own community of Pangbourne Garden City. But Hugh had forgotten his ancient mentor then. Just as he had long since forgotten to do his good turn every day. That a Christian smiles and whistles under all difficulties and that once a scout you were always a Communist. Hugh only remembered to be prepared. So Hugh seduced Bolowski's wife.

This was perhaps a matter of opinion... But unfortunately it hadn't changed Bolowski's decision to file suit for divorce, naming Hugh as correspondent. Almost worse was to follow. Bolowski suddenly charged Hugh with attempting to deceive him in other respects, that the songs he'd published were nothing less than plagiarisms of two obscure American numbers. Hugh was staggered. Could this be? Had he been living in a world of illusion so absolute he'd looked forward pa.s.sionately to the publication of someone else's songs, paid for by himself, or rather by his aunt, that, involvedly, even his disillusionment on their account was false? It was not, it proved, quite so bad as that. Yet there was all too solid ground for the accusation so far as one song was concerned...

On the daybed Hugh wrestled with his cigar. G.o.d almighty. Good G.o.d all blistering mighty. He must have known all the time. He knew he had known. On the other hand, caring only for the rendering, it looked as if he could be persuaded by his guitar that almost any song was his. The fact that the American number was infallibly a plagiarism too didn't help the slightest. Hugh was in anguish. At this point he was living in Blackheath and one day, the threat of exposure d.o.g.g.i.ng every footstep, he walked fifteen miles to the city, through the slums of Lewisham, Catford, New Cross, down the Old Kent Road, past, ah, the Elephant and Castle, into the heart of London. His poor songs pursued him in a minor key now, macabre. He wished he could be lost in these poverty-stricken hopeless districts romanticized by Longfellow. He wished the world would swallow him and his disgrace. For disgrace there would be. The publicity he had once evoked on his own behalf a.s.sured it. How was his aunt going to feel now? And Geoff? The few people who believed in him? Hugh conceived a last gigantic pogrom; in vain. It seemed, finally, almost a comfort that his mother and father were dead. As for the senior tutor of his college, it wasn't likely he would care to welcome a freshman just dragged through the divorce courts; dread words. The prospect seemed horrible, life at an end, the only hope to sign on another ship immediately it was all over, or if possible, before it all began.

Then, suddenly, a miracle occurred, something fantastic, unimaginable, and for which to this day Hugh could find no logical explanation. All at once Bolowski dropped the whole thing. He forgave his wife. He sent for Hugh and, with the utmost dignity, forgave him. The divorce suit was withdrawn. So were the plagiarism charges. It was all a mistake, Bolowski said. At worst the songs had never been distributed, so what damage had been done? The sooner it was all forgotten the better. Hugh could not believe his ears: nor in memory believe them now, nor that, so soon after everything had seemed so completely lost, and one's life irretrievably ruined, one should, as though nothing had happened, Have calmly gone up to-- "Help."

Geoffrey, his face half covered with lather, was standing in the doorway of his room, beckoning tremulously with a shaving brush and Hugh, throwing his ravaged cigar into the garden, rose and followed him in. He normally had to pa.s.s through this interesting room to reach his own (the door of which stood open opposite, revealing the mowing-machine) and at the moment, Yvonne's being occupied, to reach the bathroom. This was a delightful place, and extremely large for the size of the house; its windows, through which sunlight was pouring, looked down the drive towards the Calle Nicaragua. The room was pervaded by some sweet heavy scent of Yvonne's, while the odours of the garden filtered in through Geoff's open bedroom window.

"The shakes are awful, did you never have the shakes?" the Consul was saying, shivering all over: Hugh took the shaving brush from him and began to relather it on a tablet of fragrant a.s.ses'-milk soap lying in the basin. "Yes, you did, I remember. But not the rajah shakes."

"No--no newspaperman ever had the shakes." Hugh arranged a towel about the Consul's neck. "You mean the wheels."

"The wheels within wheels this is."

"I deeply sympathize. Now then, we're all set. Stand still."

"How on earth can I stand still?"

"Perhaps you'd better sit down."

But the Consul could not sit down either.

"Jesus, Hugh, I'm sorry. I can't stop bouncing about. It's like being in a tank--did I say tank? Christ, I need a drink. What have we here?" The Consul grasped, from the window-sill, an uncorked bottle of bay rum. "What's this like, do you suppose, eh? For the scalp." Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. "Not bad. Not at all bad," he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. "If slightly underproof... Like pernod, a little. A charm against galloping c.o.c.kroaches anyway. And the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions. Wait a minute, I'm going to be--"

Hugh let the taps run loudly. Next door he heard Yvonne moving about, getting ready to go to Tomalin. But he'd left the radio playing on the porch; probably she could hear no more than the usual bathroom babel.

"t.i.t for tat," the Consul, still trembling, commented, when Hugh had a.s.sisted him back to his chair. "I did that for you once."

"Si, hombre! Hugh, lathering the brush again on the a.s.ses'-milk soap, raised his eyebrows. "Quite so. Better now, old fellow?"

"When you were an infant," the Consul's teeth chattered. "On the P. O. boat coming back from India... The old Cocanada'

Hugh resettled the towel around his brother's neck, then, as if absent-mindedly obeying the other's wordless instructions, went out, humming, through the bedroom back to the porch, where the radio was now stupidly playing Beethoven in the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whisky bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly--in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying--on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection: Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda--G.o.d knows, Peter Rabbit; "Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit," the Consul liked to say--Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured himself a stiff drink into a tooth mug. "Wherever did you find that?--ah!... You've saved my life!"

"That's nothing. I did the same for Carruthers once." Hugh now set about shaving the Consul who had become much steadier almost immediately.

"Carruthers--the Old Crow?... Did what for Carruthers?"

"Held his head."

"He wasn't tight of course, though."

"Not tight... Submerged. In a supervision too." Hugh flourished the cut-throat razor. "Try and sit still like that; you're doing fine. He had a great respect for you--he had an enormous number of stories about you, mostly variations on the same one... however. The one about your riding into college on a horse--"

"Oh no... I wouldn't have ridden it in. Anything bigger than a sheep frightens me."

"Anyway there the horse was, tied up in the b.u.t.tery. A pretty ferocious horse too. Apparently it took about thirty-seven gyps and the college porter to get it out."

"Good lord... But I can't imagine Carruthers ever getting so tight he'd pa.s.s out at a supervision. Let me see, he was only praelector in my time. I believe he was really more interested in his first editions than in us. Of course it was at the beginning of the war, a rather trying period... But he was a wonderful old chap."

"He was still praelector in mine."

(In my time?... But what, exactly, does that mean? What, if anything, did one do at Cambridge, that would show the soul worthy of Siegebert of East Anglia--Or, John Cornford! Did one dodge lectures, cut halls, fail to row for the college, fool one's supervisor, finally, oneself? Read economics, then history, Italian, barely pa.s.sing one's exams? Climb the gateway against which one had an unseaman-like aversion, to visit Bill Plantagenet in Sherlock Court, and, clutching the wheel of St Catherine, feel, for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern? Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-a.s.surance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Gra.s.s. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: G.o.d forgive me. While oneself lived in a disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots, kept by a cripple, in a hovel near the station yard. Cambridge was the sea reversed; at the same time a horrible regression; in the strictest sense--despite one's avowed popularity, the G.o.dsent opportunity--the most appalling of nightmares, as if a grown man should suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr Bult.i.tude in Vice Versa, to be confronted, not by the hazards of business, but by the geometry lesson he had failed to prepare thirty years before, and the torments of p.u.b.erty. Digs and forecastles are where they are in the heart. Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, into its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, on gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, sn.o.bberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged--giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war. It was as though that experience of the sea, also, exaggerated by time, had invested one with the profound inner maladjustment of the sailor who can never be happy on land. One had begun, however, to play the guitar more seriously. And once again one's best friends were often Jews, often the same Jews who had been at school with one. It must be admitted they were there first, having been there off and on since A.D. 1106. But now they seemed almost the only people old as oneself: only they had any generous, independent sense of beauty. Only a Jew did not deface the monk's dream. And somehow only a Jew, with his rich endowment of premature suffering, could understand one's own suffering, one's isolation, essentially, one's poor music. So that in my time and with my aunt's aid I bought a University weekly. Avoiding college functions, I became a staunch supporter of Zionism. As a leader of a band composed largely of Jews, playing at local dances, and of my own private outfit Three Able Seamen, I ama.s.sed a considerable sum. The beautiful Jewish wife of a visiting American lecturer became my mistress. I had seduced her too with my guitar. Like Philoctetes's bow or Oedipus's daughter it was my guide and prop. I played it without bashfulness wherever I went. Nor did it strike me as any less than an unexpected and useful compliment that Phillipson, the artist, should have troubled to represent me, in a rival paper, as an immense guitar, inside which an oddly familiar infant was hiding, curled up, as in a womb--) "Of course he was always a great connoisseur of wines."

"He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day." Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother's beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery. "Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?... You know, some of the genuine old 1611."

"G.o.d how funny... Or isn't it? The poor Old Crow."

"He was a marvellous fellow." "The best."

(... I have played the guitar before the Prince of Wales, begged in the streets with one for ex-servicemen on Armistice Day, performed at a reception given by the Amundsen society, and to a caucus of the French Chamber of Deputies as they arranged the approaching years. The Three Able Seamen achieved meteoric fame, Metronome compared us to Venuti's Blue Four. Once the worst possible thing that could befall me seemed some hand injury. Nevertheless one dreamed frequently of dying, bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar, strumming to the end... Yet I stopped of my own accord. Suddenly, less than a year after going down from Cambridge, stopped, first in bands, then playing it intimately, stopped so completely that Yvonne, despite the tenuous bond of being born in Hawaii, doubtless doesn't know I ever played, so emphatically no one says any longer: Hugh, where's your guitar? Come on and give us a tune--) "I have," the Consul said, "a slight confession to make, Hugh... I cheated a little on the strychnine while you were away."

"Thalavethiparothiam, is it?" Hugh observed, pleasantly menacing. "Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don't be careful, as the Mexicans say, I'm going to shave the back of your neck."

But first Hugh wiped the razor with some tissue paper, glancing absently through the door into the Consul's room. The bedroom windows were wide open; the curtains blew inward very gently. The wind had almost dropped. The scents of the garden were heavy about them. Hugh heard the wind starting to blow again on the other side of the house, the fierce breath of the Atlantic, flavoured with wild Beethoven. But here, on the leeward side, those trees one could see through the bathroom window seemed unaware of it. And the curtains were engaged with their own gentle breeze. Like the crew's washing on board a tramp steamer, strung over number six hatch between sleek derricks lying in grooves, that barely dances in the afternoon sunlight, while abaft the beam not a league away some pitching native craft with violently flapping sails seems wrestling a hurricane, they swayed imperceptibly, as to another control...

(Why did I stop playing the guitar? Certainly not because, belatedly, one had come to see the point of Phillipson's picture, the cruel truth it contained... They are losing the Battle of the Ebro--And yet, one might well have seen one's continuing to play as but another form of publicity stunt, a means of keeping oneself in the limelight, as if those weekly articles for the News of the World were not limelight enough! Or myself with the thing destined to be some kind of incurable "love-object," or eternal troubadour, jongleur, interested only in married women--why?--incapable finally of love altogether... b.l.o.o.d.y little man. Who, anyhow, no longer wrote songs. While the guitar as an end in itself at least seemed simply futile; no longer even fun--certainly a childish thing to be put away--) "Is that right?"

"Is what right?"

"Do you see that poor exiled maple tree outside there," asked the Consul, "propped up with those crutches of cedar?"

"No--luckily for you--"

"One of these days, when the wind blows from the other direction, it's going to collapse." The Consul spoke haltingly while Hugh shaved his neck. "And do you see that sunflower looking in through the bedroom window? It stares into my room all day."

"It strolled into your room, do you say?"

"Stares. Fiercely. All day. Like G.o.d!"

(The last time I played it... Strumming in the King of Bohemia, London. Benskin's Fine Ales and Stouts. And waking, after pa.s.sing out, to find John and the rest singing unaccompanied that song about the balgine run. What, anyhow, is a balgine run? Revolutionary songs; bogus bolshy;--but why had one never heard such songs before? Or, for that matter, in England, seen such rich spontaneous enjoyment in singing? Perhaps because at any given gathering, one had always been singing oneself. Sordid songs: I Ain't Got n.o.body. Loveless songs: The One That I Love Loves Me... Though John "and the rest" were not, to one's own experience at least, bogus: no more than who, at sunset walking with the crowd, or receiving bad news, witnessing injustice, once turned and thought, did not believe, turned back and questioned, decided to act... They are winning the Battle of the Ebro! Not for me, perhaps. Yet no wonder indeed if these friends, some of whom now lie dead on Spanish soil, had, as I then understood, really been bored by my pseudo-American tw.a.n.ging, not even good tw.a.n.ging finally, and had only been listening out of politeness--tw.a.n.ging--) "Have another drink." Hugh replenished the toothmug, handed it to the Consul, and picked up for him a copy of El Universal lying on the floor. "I think a little more down the side with that beard, and at the base of the neck." Hugh stropped the razor thoughtfully.

"A communal drink." The Consul pa.s.sed the toothmug over his shoulder. ""Clank of coins irritates at Forth Worth."

Holding the paper quite steadily the Consul read aloud from the English page: "'Kink unhappy in exile.' I don't believe it myself. 'Town counts dogs' noses.' I don't believe that either, do you, Hugh?..."

"And--ah--yes!" he went on, ""Eggs have been in a tree at Klamath Falls for a hundred years, lumberjacks estimate by rings of wood." Is that the kind of stuff you write nowadays?"

"Almost exactly. Or: j.a.panese astride all roads from Shanghai. Americans evacuate... That kind of thing.--Sit still."

(One had not, however, played it from that day to this... No, nor been happy from that day to this either... A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing. And anyway, without the guitar, was one any less in the limelight, any less interested in married women--so on, and so forth? One immediate result of giving it up was undoubtedly that second trip to sea, that series of articles, the first for the Globe, on the British Coasting Trade. Then yet another trip--coming to naught spiritually. I ended a pa.s.senger. But the articles were a success. Saltcaked smokestacks. Britannia rules the waves. In future my work was looked for with interest... On the other hand why have I always lacked real ambition as a newspaperman? Apparently I have never overcome that antipathy to journalists, the result of my early ardent courtship of them. Besides it cannot be said I shared with my colleagues the necessity of earning a living. There was always the income. As a roving hand I functioned fairly well, still, up to this day, have done so--yet becoming increasingly conscious of loneliness, isolation--aware too of an odd habit of thrusting myself to the fore, then subsiding--as if one remembered one hadn't the guitar after all... Maybe I bored people with my guitar. But in a sense--who cares?--it strung me to life--) "Somebody quoted you in the Universal," the Consul was laughing, "some time ago. I just forget about what, I'm afraid... Hugh, how would you like, 'at a modest sacrifice,' an 'imported pair embroidered street extra large nearly new fur coat'?"

"Sit still."

"Or a Cadillac for 500 pesos. Original price 200... And what would this mean, do you suppose? 'And a white horse also.' Apply at box seven... Strange... Anti-alcoholic fish. Don't like the sound of that. But here's something for you. 'A centricle apartment suitable for love-nest.' Or alternatively, a 'serious, discrete--""

"--ha--"

"--apartment... Hugh, listen to this. "For a young European lady who must be pretty, acquaintanceship with a cultured man, not old, with good positions--"

The Consul was shaking with laughter only, it appeared, and Hugh, laughing too, paused, razor aloft.

"But the remains of Juan Ramirez, the famous singer, Hugh, are still wandering in a melancholy fashion from place to place... Hullo, it says here that "grave objections" have been made to the immodest behaviour of certain police chiefs in Quauhnahuac. "Grave objections to--" what's this?--"performing their private functions in public"--"

('Climbed the Parson's Nose," one had written, in the visitors" book at the little Welsh rock-climbing hotel, "in twenty minutes. Found the rocks very easy." "Came down the Parson's Nose," some immortal wag had added a day later, "in twenty seconds. Found the rocks very hard..".. So now, as I approach the second half of my life, unheralded, unsung, and without a guitar, I am going back to sea again: perhaps these days of waiting are more like that droll descent, to be survived in order to repeat the climb. At the top of the Parson's Nose you could walk home to tea over the hills if you wished, just as the actor in the Pa.s.sion Play can get off his cross and go home to his hotel for a Pilsener. Yet in life ascending or descending you were perpetually involved with the mists, the cold and the overhangs, the treacherous rope and the slippery belay; only, while the rope slipped there was sometimes time to laugh. None the less, I am afraid... As I am also of a simple gate, and climbing windy masts in port... Will it be as bad as the first voyage, the harsh reality of which for some reason suggests Yvonne's farm? One wonders how she will feel the first time she sees someone stick a pig... Afraid; and yet not afraid; I know what the sea is like; can it be that I am returning to it with my dreams intact, nay, with dreams that, being without viciousness, are more child-like than before. I love the sea, the pure Norwegian sea. My disillusionment once more is a pose. What am I trying to prove by all this? Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hypocrite, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors. Tufthunter and pioneer in disguise. Iconoclast and explorer. Undaunted bore undone by trivialities! Why, one asks, instead of feeling stricken in that pub, didn't I set about learning some of those songs, those precious revolutionary songs. What is to prevent one's learning more of such songs now, new songs, different songs, anyhow, if only to recapture some early joy in merely singing, and playing the guitar? What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men... The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening, strolling towards the tumultuous kitchen of St John's--who is it that behind me has emerged from the rooms of the Professor living in D4? And who is it also strolling towards the Porter's lodge--where, our orbits crossing, asks me the time? Is this Einstein, up for an honours degree? And who smiles when I say I don't know... And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world's notions of time and s.p.a.ce, once leaned down over the side of his hammock strung between Aries and the Circlet of the Western Fish, to ask me, befuddled ex-anti-Semite, and ragged freshman huddled in his gown at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed--) "--better than having them perform their public functions in private anyhow, I should have thought," Hugh said.

"You might have hit on something there. That is, those birds referred to are not police in the strict sense. As a matter of fact the regular police are--"

"I know, they're on strike."

"So of course they must be democratic from your point of view... Just like the army. All right, it's a democratic army... But meantime these other cads are throwing their weight about a bit. It's a pity you're leaving. It might have been a story right down your alley. Did you ever hear of the Union Militar?"

"You mean the pre-war thingmetight, in Spain?"

"I mean here in this state. It's affiliated to the Military Police, by which they're covered, so to speak, because the Inspector-General, who is the Military Police, is a member. So is the Jefe de Jardineros, I believe."

"I heard they were putting up a new statue to Diaz in Oaxaca."

"--Just the same," pursued the Consul, in a slightly lowered tone, as their conversation continued in the next room, "there is this Union Militar, sinarquistas, whatever they're called, if you're interested, I'm not personally--and their headquarters used to be in the policia de Seguridad here, though it isn't any longer, but in Parian somewhere, I heard."

Finally the Consul was ready. The only further help he had required was with his socks. Wearing a freshly pressed shirt and a pair of tweed trousers with the jacket to them Hugh had borrowed and now brought in from the porch, he stood gazing at himself in the mirror.

It was most surprising, not only did the Consul now appear fresh and lively but to be dispossessed of any air of dissipation whatsoever. True, he had not before the haggard look of a depraved worn-out old man: why should he indeed, when he was only twelve years older than Hugh himself? Yet it was as though fate had fixed his age at some unidentifiable moment in the past, when his persistent objective self, perhaps weary of standing askance and watching his downfall, had at last withdrawn from him altogether, like a ship secretly leaving harbour at night. Sinister stories as well as funny and heroic had been told about his brother, whose own early poetic instincts clearly helped the legend. It occurred to Hugh that the poor old chap might be, finally, helpless, in the grip of something against which all his remarkable defences could avail him little. What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn't there. Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and const.i.tution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to G.o.d for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together. While what had given rise to all these reflections was doubtless only the photograph on the wall both were now studying, whose presence there at all must surely discount most of those old stories, of a small camouflaged freighter, at which the Consul suddenly gestured with replenished toothmug: " Everything about the Samaritan was a ruse. See those windla.s.ses and bulkheads. That black entrance that looks as though it might be the entrance to the forecastle, that's a shift too--there's an anti-aircraft gun stowed away snugly in there. Over there, that's the way you go down. Those were my quarters... There's your quartermaster's alley. That galley--it could become a battery, before you could say Coclogenus paca Mexico...

" Curiously enough though," the Consul peered closer, "I cut that picture out of a German magazine," and Hugh too was scrutinizing the Gothic writing beneath the photograph: Der englische Dampfer tragt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-boote. "Only on the next page, I recall, was a picture of the Emdenk the Consul went on, "with 'So verlies ich der Weltteil unserer Antipoden,' something of that nature, under it. 'Our Antipodes.'" He gave Hugh a sharp glance that might have meant anything. "Queer people. But I see you're interested in my old books all of a sudden... Too bad... I left my Boehme in Paris."

"I was just looking."

At, for G.o.d's sake, A Treatise of Sulphur: written by Michall Sandivogius i.e. anagramatically Divi Leschi Genus Amo; at The Hermetical Triumph or the Victorious Philosophical Stone, a Treatise more compleat and more intelligible than any has been yet, concerning the Hermetical Magistery; at The Secrets Revealed or an Open Entrance to the Sub-Palace of the King, containing the greatest Treasure in Chymistry never yet so plainly discovered, composed by a most famous Englishman styling himself Anonymus or Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita who by inspiration and reading attained to the Philosopher's Stone at his age of twenty-three years Anno Domini 1645; at The Musaeum Hermetic.u.m, Reformatum et Amplificatum, Omnes Sopho-Spagyricae artis Discipulos fidelissime erudiens, quo pacto Summa ilia vera que Lapidis Philosophici Medicina, qua res omnes qualemcunque defectum patientes, instaurantur, inveniri haberi queat, Continens.Trattatus Chimicos xxi Francofurti, Apud Hermannum a Sande CID IDC LXXVIII; at Sub-Mundanes, or the Elementaries of the Cabbala, reprinted from the text of the Abbi de Villars: Physio-Astro-Mystic: with an Ill.u.s.trative Appendix from the work Demoniality, wherein is a.s.serted that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides men...

"Are there?" Hugh said, holding in his hand this last extraordinary old book--from which emanated a venerable and remote smell--and reflecting: "Jewish knowledge!" while a sudden absurd vision of Mr Bolowski in another life, in a caftan, with a long white beard, and skull-cap, and pa.s.sionate intent look, standing at a stall in a sort of medieval New Compton Street, reading a sheet of music in which the notes were Hebrew letters, was conjured to his mind.

"Erekia, the one who tears asunder; and they who shriek with a long-drawn cry, Illirikim; Apelki, the misleaders or turners aside; and those who attack their prey by tremulous motion, Dresop; ah, and the distressful painbringing ones, Arekesoli; and one must not forget, either, Burasin, the destroyers by stifling smoky breath; nor Glesi, the one who glistens horribly like an insect; nor Effrigis, the one who quivers in a horrible manner, you'd like Effrigis... nor yet the Mames, those who move by backward motion, nor the movers with a particular creeping motion, Ramisen..." the Consul was saying. "The flesh in-clothed and the evil questioners. Perhaps you would not call them precisely rational. But all these at one time or another have visited my bed."

They had all of them in a tremendous hurry and the friendliest of humours set off for Tomalin. Hugh, himself somewhat aware of his drinks, was listening in a dream to the Consul's voice rambling on--Hitler, he pursued, as they stepped out into the Calle Nicaragua--which might have been a story right down his alley, if only he'd shown any interest before--merely wished to annihilate the Jews in order to obtain just such arcana as could be found behind them in his bookshelves--when suddenly in the house the telephone rang.

"No, let it ring," the Consul said as Hugh started back. It went on ringing (for Concepta had gone out), the tintinnabulation beating around the empty rooms like a trapped bird; then it stopped.

As they moved on Yvonne said: "Why no, Geoff, don't keep bothering about me, I feel quite rested. But if Tomalin's too far for either of you, why don't we go to the zoo?" She looked at them both darkly and directly and beautifully with her candid eyes under the broad brow, eyes with which she did not quite return Hugh's smile, though her mouth suggested one. Perhaps she seriously interpreted Geoff's flow of conversation as a good sign. And perhaps it was! Qualifying it with loyal interest, or at a quick preoccupied tangent with observations upon impersonal change or decay, serapes or carbon or ice, the weather--where was the wind now? they might have a nice calm day after all without too much dust--Yvonne, apparently revived by her swim and taking in everything about her afresh with an objective eye, walked with swiftness and grace and independence, and as though really not tired; yet it struck Hugh she walked by herself. Poor darling Yvonne! Greeting her when she was ready had been like meeting her once again after long absence, but it was also like parting. For Hugh's usefulness was exhausted, their "plot" subtly lamed by small circ.u.mstances, of which not the least was his own continued presence. It would seem impossible now as their old pa.s.sion to seek without imposture to be alone with her, even with Geoff's interest at heart. Hugh cast a longing glance down the hill, the way they'd gone this morning. Now they were hastening in the opposite direction. This morning might have been already far in the past, like childhood or the days before the last war; the future was beginning to unwind, the euchred stupid b.l.o.o.d.y terrific guitar-playing future. Unsuitably girded against it, Hugh felt, noted with a reporter's measure, Yvonne, barelegged, was wearing instead of her yellow slacks a white tailored sharkskin suit with one b.u.t.ton at the waist, and beneath it a brilliant high-necked blouse, like a detail in a Rousseau; the heels of her red shoes clicking laconically on the broken stones appeared neither flat nor high, and she carried a bright red bag. Pa.s.sing her one would not have suspected agony. One would not have noticed lack of faith, nor questioned that she knew where she was going, nor wondered if she were walking in her sleep. How happy and pretty she looks, one would say. Probably she is going to meet her lover in the Bella Vista!--Women of medium height, slenderly built, mostly divorced, pa.s.sionate but envious of the male--angel to him as he is bright or dark, yet unconscious destructive succubus of his ambitions--American women, with that rather graceful swift way of walking, with the clean scrubbed tanned faces of children, the skin finely textured with a satin sheen, their hair clean and shining as though just washed, and looking like that, but carelessly done, the slim brown hands that do not rock the cradle, the slender feet--how many centuries of oppression have produced them? They do not care who is losing the Battle of the Ebro, for it is too soon for them to outsnort Job's warhorse. They see no significance in it, only fools going to death for a-- "One always heard they had a therapeutic quality. They always had zoos in Mexico apparently--Moctezuma, courteous fellow, even showed stout Cortes around a zoo. The poor chap thought he was in the infernal regions." The Consul had discovered a scorpion on the wall.

"Alacran?" Yvonne produced.

"It looks like a violin."

"A curious bird is the scorpion. He cares not for priest nor for poor peon... It's really a beautiful creature. Leave him be. He'll only sting himself to death anyway." The Consul swung his stick...

They climbed the Calle Nicaragua, always between the parallel swift streams, past the school with the grey tombstones and the swing like a gallows, past high mysterious walls, and hedges intertwined with crimson flowers, among which marmalade-coloured birds were trapezing, crying raucously. Hugh felt glad of his drinks now, remembering from his boyhood how the last day of the holidays was always worse if you went anywhere, how then time, that one had hoped to bemuse, would at any moment begin to glide after you like a shark following a swimmer.--Box! said an advertis.e.m.e.nt. Arena Tomalin. El Balon vs El Redondillo. The Balloon vs the Bouncing Ball--was that? Domingo... But that was for Sunday; while they were only going to a bullthrowing, a purpose in life whose object was not even worth advertising. 666: also said further advertis.e.m.e.nts for an insecticide, obscure yellow tin plates at the bottom of walls, to the quiet delight of the Consul. Hugh chuckled to himself. So far the Consul was doing superbly. His few "necessary drinks," reasonable or outrageous, had worked wonders. He was walking magnificently erect, shoulders thrown back, chest out: the best thing about it was his deceitful air of infallibility, of the unquestionable, especially when contrasted with what one must look like oneself in cowboy clothes. In his finely cut tweeds (the coat Hugh had borrowed was not much crumpled, and now Hugh had borrowed another one) and blue and white striped old Chagfordian tie, with the barbering Hugh had given him, his thick fair hair neatly slicked back, his freshly trimmed brownish greying beard, his stick, his dark gla.s.ses, who would say that he was not, unmistakably, a figure of complete respectability? And if this respectable figure, the Consul might have been saying, appeared to be undergoing from time to time a slight mutation, what of it? who noticed? It might be--for an Englishman in a foreign country always expects to meet another Englishman--merely of nautical origin. If not, his limp, obviously the result of an elephant hunt or an old brush with Pathans, excused it. The typhoon spun invisibly in the midst of a tumult of broken pavements: who was aware of its existence, let alone what landmarks in the brain it had destroyed? Hugh was laughing.

"Plingen, plangen, aufgefangen Swingen, sw.a.n.gen at my side, Poode, swoode, off to Boode, Nemesis, a pleasant ride,"

said the Consul mysteriously, and added with heroism, glancing about him: "It's really an extraordinarily nice day to take a trip."

No se permite fijar anuncios...

Yvonne was in fact walking alone now: they climbed in a sort of single file, Yvonne ahead, the Consul and Hugh unevenly behind, and whatever their collective distraught soul might be thinking Hugh was oblivious of it, for he had become involved with a fit of laughing, which the Consul was trying not to find infectious. They walked in this manner because a boy was driving some cows past them down the hill, half running; and, as in a dream of a dying Hindu, steering them by their tails. Now there were some goats. Yvonne turned and smiled at him. Rut these goats were meek and sweet-looking, jangling little bells. Father is waiting for you though. Father has not forgotten. Behind the goats a woman with a black clenched face staggered past them under the weight of a basket loaded with carbon. A peon loped after her down the hill balancing a large barrel of ice-cream on his head and calling apparently for customers, with what hope of success one could not imagine, since he seemed so burdened as to be unable either to look from side to side or to halt.

"It's true that at Cambridge," the Consul was saying, tapping Hugh on the shoulder, "you may have learned about Guelphs and so on... But did you know that no angel with six wings is ever transformed?"