A Burnt Out Case (8 page)

His own presence here was hardly more explicable than that of Deo Gratias. The thought of his servant lying injured in the forest waiting for the call or footstep of any human being would perhaps at an earlier time have vexed him all night until he was forced into making a token gesture. But now that he cared for nothing, perhaps he was being driven only by a vestige of intellectual curiosity. What had brought Deo Gratias here out of the safety and familiarity of the leproserie? The path, of course, might be leading somewhere – to a village perhaps where Deo Gratias had relations – but he had already learned enough of Africa to know that it was more likely to peter out – to be the relic of a track made by men who had come searching for caterpillars to fry, it might well mark the farthest limit of human penetration. What was the meaning of the sweat he had seen pouring down the man’s face? It might have been caused by fear or anxiety or even, in the heavy river-heat, by the pressure of thought. Interest began to move painfully in him like a nerve that has been frozen. He had lived with inertia so long that he examined his ‘interest’ with clinical detachment.

He must have been walking now, he told himself, over an hour. How had Deo Gratias come so far without his staff on mutilated feet? He felt more than ever doubtful whether the battery would last him home. None the less, he went on. He realized how foolish he had been not to tell the doctor or one of the fathers where he was going in case of accident, but wasn’t an accident perhaps exactly what he was seeking? In any case he went on, while the mosquitoes droned to the attack. There was no point in waving them away. He trained himself to submit.

Fifty yards further he was startled by a harsh animal sound – the kind of grunt he could imagine a wild boar giving. He stopped and moved his waning light in a circle round him. He saw that many years ago this path must have been intended to lead somewhere, for in front of him were the remains of a bridge made from the trunks of trees that had long ago rotted. Two more steps and he would have fallen down the gap, not a great fall, a matter of feet only, into a shallow overgrown marsh, but for a man mutilated in hands and feet far enough: the light shone on the body of Deo Gratias, half in the water, half out. He could see the tracks made in the wet and slippery ground by hands like boxing gloves which had tried to catch hold. Then the body grunted again, and Querry climbed down beside it.

Querry couldn’t tell whether Deo Gratias was conscious or not. His body was too heavy to lift, and he made no effort to cooperate. He was warm and wet like a hummock of soil; he felt like part of the bridge that had fallen in many years ago. After ten minutes of struggle Querry managed to drag his limbs out of the water – it was all he could do. The obvious thing now, if his torch would last long enough, was to fetch help. Even if the Africans refused to return with him two of the fathers would certainly aid him. He made to climb up on to the bridge and Deo Gratias howled, as a dog or a baby might howl. He raised a stump and howled, and Querry realized that he was crippled with fear. The fingerless hand fell on Querry’s arm like a hammer and held him there.

There was nothing to be done but wait for the morning. The man might die of fear, but neither of them would die from damp or mosquito-bites. He settled himself down as comfortably as he could by the boy and by the last light of the torch examined the rocky feet. As far as he could tell an ankle was broken – that seemed to be all. Soon the light was so dim that Querry could see the shape of the filament in the dark, like a phosphorescent worm; then it went out altogether. He took Deo Gratias’s hand to reassure him, or rather laid his own hand down beside it; you cannot take a fingerless hand. Deo Gratias grunted twice, and then uttered a word. It sounded like ‘Pendélé’. In the darkness the knuckles felt as a rock might that has been eroded for years by the weather.

II

‘We both had a lot of time to think,’ Querry said to Doctor Colin. ‘It wasn’t light enough to leave him till about six. I suppose it was about six – I had forgotten to wind my watch.’

‘It must have been a long bad night.’

‘One has had worse alone.’ He seemed to be searching his memory for an example. ‘Nights when things end. Those are the interminable nights. In a way you know this seemed a night when things begin. I’ve never much minded physical discomfort. And after about an hour when I tried to move my hand, he wouldn’t let it go. His fist lay on it like a paperweight. I had an odd feeling that he needed me.’

‘Why odd?’ Doctor Colin asked.

‘Odd to me. I’ve needed people often enough in my life. You might accuse me of having used people more than I have ever loved them. But to be needed is a different sensation, a tranquillizer, not an excitement. Do you know what the word “Pendélé” means? Because after I moved my hand he began to talk. I had never properly listened to an African talking before. You know how one listens with half an ear, as one does to children. It wasn’t easy to follow the mixture of French and whatever language it is that Deo Gratias speaks. And this word “Pendélé” continually cropped up. What does it mean, doctor?’

‘I’ve an idea that it means something the same as
Bunkasi
– and that means pride, arrogance, perhaps a kind of dignity and independence if you look at the good side of the word.’

‘It’s not what he meant. I am certain he meant a place – somewhere in the forest, near water, where something of great importance to him was happening. He had felt strangled his last day in the leproserie; of course he didn’t use the word “strangled”, he told me there wasn’t enough air, he wanted to dance and shout and run and sing. But, poor fellow, he couldn’t run or dance, and the fathers would have taken a poor view of the kind of songs he wanted to sing. So he set out to find this place beside the water. He had been taken there once by his mother when he was a child, and he could remember how there had been singing and dancing and games and prayers.’

‘But Deo Gratias comes from hundreds of miles away.’

‘Perhaps there is more than one “Pendélé” in the world.’

‘A lot of people left the leproserie three nights ago. They’ve most of them come back. I expect they had some kind of witchcraft going on. He started too late and he couldn’t catch up with them.’

‘I asked him what prayers. He said they prayed to Yezu Klisto and someone called Simon. Is that the same as Simon Peter?’

‘No, not quite the same. The fathers could tell you about Simon. He died in gaol nearly twenty years ago. They think he’ll rise again. It’s a strange Christianity we have here, but I wonder whether the Apostles would find it as difficult to understand as the collected works of Thomas Aquinas. If Peter could have understood those, it would have been a greater miracle than Pentecost, don’t you think? Even the Nicaean Creed – it has the flavour of higher mathematics to me.’

‘That word “Pendélé” runs in my head.’

‘We always connect hope with youth,’ Doctor Colin said, ‘but sometimes it can be one of the diseases of age. The cancerous growth you find unexpectedly in the dying after a deep operation. These people here are all dying – oh, I don’t mean of leprosy, I mean of us. And their last disease is hope.’

‘Then you’ll know where to look for me,’ Querry said, ‘if I should be missing.’ An unexpected sound made the doctor look up; Querry’s face was twisted into the rictus of a laugh. The doctor realized with astonishment that Querry had perpetrated a joke.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 1

I

Rycker and his wife drove into town for cocktails with the Governor. In a village by the road stood a great wooden cage on stilts where once a year at a festival a man danced above the flames lit below: in the bush thirty kilometres before they had passed something sitting in a chair constructed out of a palm-nut and woven fibres into the rough and monstrous appearance of a human being. Inexplicable objects were the fingerprints of Africa. Naked women smeared white with grave-clay fled up the banks as the car passed, hiding their faces.

Rycker said, ‘When Mme Guelle asks you what you will drink, say a glass of Perrier.’

‘Not an
orange pressée
?’

‘Not unless you can see a jug of it on the sideboard. We mustn’t inconvenience her.’

Marie Rycker took in the advice seriously and then turned her eyes from her husband and stared away at the dull forest wall. The only path that led inside was closed with fibre-mats for a ceremony no white man must see.

‘You heard what I said, darling?’

‘Yes. I will remember.’

‘And the
canapés
. Don’t eat too many of them like you did last time. We haven’t come to the Residence to take a meal. It creates a bad impression.’

‘I won’t touch a thing.’

‘That would be just as bad. It would look as though you had noticed they were stale. They usually are.’

The little medal of St Christopher jingle-jangled like a fetish below the windscreen.

‘I am frightened,’ the girl said. ‘It is all so complicated and Mme Guelle does not like me.’

‘It isn’t that she doesn’t like you,’ Rycker explained kindly. ‘It is only that last time, you remember, you began to leave before the wife of the Commissioner. Of course, we are not bound by these absurd colonial rules, but we don’t want to seem pushing and it is generally understood that as leading
commerçants
we come after the Public Works. Watch for Mme Cassin to leave.’

‘I never remember any of their names.’

‘The very fat one. You can’t possibly miss her. By the way if Querry should be there don’t be shy of inviting him for the night. In a place like this one longs for intelligent conversation. For the sake of Querry I would even put up with that atheist Doctor Colin. We could make up another bed on the veranda.’

But neither Querry nor Colin was there.

‘A Perrier if you are sure it’s no trouble,’ Marie Rycker said. Everybody had been driven in from the garden, for it was the hour when the D.D.T. truck cannoned a stinging hygienic fog over the town.

Mme Guelle graciously brought the Perrier with her own hands. ‘You are the only people,’ she said, ‘who seem to have met M. Querry. The mayor would have liked him to sign the Golden Book, but he seems to spend all his time in that sad place out there. Now you perhaps could pry him out for all our sakes.’

‘We don’t really know him,’ Marie Rycker said. ‘He spent the night with us when the river was in flood, that’s all. He wouldn’t have stayed otherwise. I don’t think he wants to see people. My husband promised not to tell . . .’

‘Your husband was quite right to tell
us
. We should have looked such fools, having
the
Querry in our own territory without being aware of it. How did he strike you, dear?’

‘I hardly spoke to him.’

‘His reputation in certain ways is very bad they tell me. Have you read the article in
Time
? Oh yes, of course, your husband showed it to us. Not of course that they write of
that
. It’s only what they say in Europe. One has to remember though that some of the great saints of the Church passed through a certain period of – how shall I put it?’

‘Do I hear you talking of saints, Mme Guelle?’ Rycker asked. ‘What excellent whisky you always have.’

‘Not exactly saints. We were discussing M. Querry.’

‘In my opinion,’ Rycker said, raising his voice a little like a monitor in a noisy classroom, ‘he may well be the greatest thing to happen in Africa since Schweitzer, and Schweitzer after all is a Protestant. I found him a most interesting companion when he stayed with us. And have you heard the latest story?’ Rycker asked the room at large, shaking the ice in his glass like a hand-bell. ‘He went out into the bush two weeks ago, they say, to find a leper who had run away. He spent the whole night with him in the forest, arguing and praying, and he persuaded the man to return and complete his treatment. It rained in the night and the man was sick with fever, so he covered him with his body.’

‘What an unconventional thing to do,’ Mme Guelle said. ‘He’s not, is he . . . ?’

The Governor was a very small man with a short-sight which gave him an appearance of moral intensity; physically he had the air of looking to his wife for protection, but like a small nation, proud of its culture, he was an unwilling satellite. He said, ‘There are more saints in the world than the Church recognizes.’ This remark stamped with official approval what might otherwise have been regarded as an eccentric or even an ambiguous action.

‘Who is this man Querry?’ the Director of Public Works asked the Manager of Otraco.

‘They say he’s a world-famous architect. You should know. He comes into your province.’

‘He’s not here officially, is he?’

‘He’s helping with the new hospital at the leproserie.’

‘But I passed those plans months ago. They don’t need an architect. It’s a simple building job.’

‘The hospital,’ Rycker said, interrupting them and drawing them within his circle, ‘you can take it from me, is only a first step. He is designing a modern African church. He hinted at that to me himself. He’s a man of great vision. What he builds lasts. A prayer in stone. There’s Monseigneur coming in. Now we shall learn what the Church thinks of Querry.’

The Bishop was a tall rakish figure with a neatly trimmed beard and the roving eye of an old-fashioned cavalier of the boulevards. He generously avoided putting out his hand to the men so that they might escape a genuflection. Women however liked to kiss his ring (it was a form of innocent flirtation), and he readily allowed it.

‘So we have a saint among us, Monseigneur,’ Mme Guelle said.

‘You honour me too much. And how is the Governor? I don’t see him here.’

‘He’s gone to unlock some more whisky. To tell the truth, Monseigneur, I was not referring to you. I’d be sorry to see you become a saint – for the time being, that is.’

‘An Augustinian thought,’ the Bishop said obscurely.