Blood and Water and Other Tales (4 page)

When at last Evelyn was able to get away, she dashed upstairs; and as she had half-feared, and halfhoped, the explorer was in her bedroom. Not only was he in her bedroom, he was in her
bed,
fully clothed, the sheets up to his chin. His teeth were chattering loudly and his whole body shivered beneath the bedclothes.

“Cold,” he grunted as Evelyn closed the door behind her and ran to the bed. “Cold, Agatha,” he said more clearly, and she reached under the bedclothes for his hand. It was frigid. Something else was down there too—she felt the hard metallic bulge of the revolver, stuffed into the explorer’s waistband. “Let me have the gun,” she whispered.

A tremor passed across the pathetic features of the dying man. “Need will,” he muttered. “Need will to do it. Pygmies...” Here he paused, and his chest heaved painfully with the effort to talk, the effort to think. Oh, how he wanted simply to slip away, let go, sink into peace and rest and silence and darkness! —but he could not let go, not yet. “Pygmies,” he said, more loudly, and Evelyn with terror clapped her hand upon his parched and cracking lips. The wild eyes darted to her bedroom door. He knew they were near. “Pygmies,” he whispered, when she lifted her palm from his mouth. “Coming to eat us. One for you, Agatha, one for me...”

“Don’t talk,” said Evelyn, her finger to her lips. “We won’t be eaten. Sleep. I’ll give you a drink.”

Evelyn fetched a drink of water, and the explorer’s eyes, as she supported his shoulders and held the cup to his lips, rested on her face with an expression of such profound pain, and gratitude, and spirit that it tested the girl’s mettle pretty sternly. But she did not flinch nor falter, and when he had drunk she eased his head back onto her pillow and stroked his chilly brow.

“Agatha,” he murmured, “Agatha,” and his grip on her fingers loosened very slightly.

The rest of that evening was nerve-racking for Evelyn. She went downstairs to say good night to Uncle Frank and Auntie Vera, and to Mummy and Daddy, and then darted back up to her bedroom. She could only hope that Mummy wouldn’t come to tuck her in tonight; it was something she did occasionally, by no means invariably. Evelyn made up a bed for herself on the carpet, and turned off the light. The explorer seemed to be sleeping soundly. She listened in the darkness for Mummy and Daddy coming up to bed. Daddy was first; she heard him brushing his teeth in the bathroom. Then Mummy came up, and stopped at the top of the stairs. Evelyn’s heart was beating fit to burst; hot chemicals discharged and flooded in turmoil about her viscera; go to bed, Mummy, a voice in her brain screamed silently,
go to bed, Mummy!
Steps across the landing, and then
—a hand on Evelyn’s door handle!

The tension, in the few moments that followed, was, to Evelyn, lying there in the darkness, her eyes wide and her stomach awash with adrenaline, almost unendurable. Frightful scenarios unfolded at lightning speed in her febrile imagination. How could Mummy and Daddy be expected to understand about the explorer? And the gun! What if—

“Denise!”

Even as the handle turned, her father’s voice called from the bathroom.

“What is it, Gerald?” replied her mother in hushed tones.

“Have we any dental floss?”

“On the shelf, dear.” The door handle was still depressed; Evelyn desperately wanted to go to the bathroom herself.

“No, I don’t see it.”

“Oh, Gerald,” murmured Mrs. Piker-Smith; and, wifely duty superseding maternal solicitude in the ethical hierarchy of that good woman, she tiptoed to the bathroom and located the dental floss. A short conversation about the beef ensued; and then Mrs. Piker-Smith went into the bedroom, closely followed by her husband, and their door, to Evelyn’s immense relief, closed behind them. But it was another excruciating hour before she dared get up and creep to the bathroom.

The next morning the explorer was dead. Silently, and, one hopes, peacefully, in the middle of the night, he had passed away. Evelyn awoke at six and realized it immediately. He was stiff and staring, and when she laid her hand upon his face, his skin was even colder than it had been last night. She closed his eyes; and then she lay on the bed beside him, on top of the blankets, and she wept quietly for ten minutes. She wept into her blankets as the fact of the loss of that long-suffering man rose up starkly in her heart, and she wept too for herself, for she was desolate. Her sorrow was keen, but it would not fester; and when she rose from her bed, wet-eyed and gulping back the hot taste of grief in her throat, she tried to think clearly what was best. But first she must air the room, and the bed, and change the sheets, for the stink of a man too long in the jungle hung heavy in Evelyn’s bedroom.

Fever had weakened him, diminished him, and the body was light. Evelyn, though skinny, was strong from hockey, and she dragged him from the bed to the closet quite easily. She sat him in the darkest corner, covered him up with a pair of old school raincoats, and pushed all her clothes to that end of the rail. Then she opened wide the windows, stuffed the sheets into her laundry basket, and climbed under the blankets, where she lay in a state of rising anxiety till Mummy should come to wake her.

“Darling, you’ll catch your death!” cried Mrs. Piker-Smith when she came in at half past eight. The windows were wide open and the day was very blustery indeed. The curtains flapped wildly and the air was chill. Even so, there were traces. “What’s that funny smell, darling?” said Mummy, standing by the closet door and wrinkling her nose. Evelyn, simulating a slow awakening, mumbled incomprehensibly from the bed. Mrs. Piker-Smith stood frowning a moment more. “It must be your hockey things,” she decided. “Give them to Mrs. Guppy, darling, and they’ll be clean for school.”

Mumble.

“It’s eight-thirty, darling”—and she went downstairs.

Evelyn stood panting in the tent. All morning the explorer had remained in her closet, and those hours had not been easy for the girl. But after lunch Daddy had gone back to the hospital, Mummy had gone to her bridge, and Mrs. Guppy had gone shopping. Evelyn breathed a prayer of thanks that all their lives were subject to such seemingly immutable routine. She’d hauled him out of the closet then and dragged him downstairs. She’d moved slowly, backwards, clutching him by the armpits. His head lolled about on his chest and his feet bumped limply on the stairs. In death he seemed so small, so light, that Evelyn was again unhappy, and her eyes brimmed with tears as she dragged him across the linoleum of the kitchen floor. She laid him down for a moment and went for a glass of water. Over the sink was the kitchen window, and it looked down on the garden. Mrs. Guppy had brought in the three white sheets; her own sheets had not yet replaced them; instead, the line was alive in the wind with her parents’ underwear. The elm at the bottom of the garden was once more whipping its limbs about. A large Persian cat paused upon the wall by the gardener’s old shed, then stalked off with dignity, picking a path along the top of the wall with its tail stiffly aloft. Evelyn had drunk her water and then manhandled the explorer down the steps, between the flowerbeds, across the lawn and round the goldfish pond, into the bushes and so to the tent. And now she would bury him.

Evelyn had long since broken open the old padlock on the shed door, and it hung there now only to hold the door. She slipped it out of the eye and the door swung open. A damp, fetid smell, dusty, earthy, filled the shed. The light with difficulty penetrated the place; a large heap of sacks moldered gently in the corner, and the old plank floor was suspiciously damp thereabouts. Evelyn had once poked about in that corner, but now she tended to avoid it, for the floor was rotten beneath the sacks, and the three substances, sacking, wood, and the earth beneath the rotten wood, had begun to coalesce, as if attempting, in their nostalgia for some primeval state of slime, to abandon structure and identity, all that could distinguish or separate them. Other signs of regression and breakdown were manifest in that dusty old shed; upon the windowsill, beneath the vast network of cobwebs, lay the stiff little corpses, some partially digested, of flies and other small winged insects, many with their tiny legs curled pathetically over them as if in a final and futile gesture of self-closure. An old cardboard box, moist with decay, was damply merging with the wall, and in it a heap of parts from some long-forgotten automobile engine congealed blackly rigid, petrifying like coal as the work of time and damp smudged them with rust and rendered their decadent inutility ever more irrevocable. Photographs had once been pinned to the wall of the shed; these now curled at the edges like the legs of the flies, and as regards their degenerated content barely a trace could now be detected of the humans who had stood, once, before the camera, vital, one presumes, and alive. It was as though they had died in the bad air, the malaria, of that neglected little corner of the garden, the thin dusty air of the old shed, within which everything must devolve to a fused state of formless unity...

But Evelyn had no time to relish regression today. She stepped across the floor and seized up a spade, its blade spotted orange with rust but its handle as yet sturdy and whole. This she took from the shed and, closing the rickety door behind her and replacing the great padlock, ran back through the windy sunshine of that October afternoon and again entered the bushes.

And now she worked briskly and methodically. She collapsed the filthy tent, noticing as she did so the multitudes of tiny equatorial insects clustering in the seams and corners. She dropped it in the corner of the clearing, and then laid the explorer upon it, and his bed beside him, and then the camp stool with its few pitiful possessions—remnants of the explorer’s last wild dash from the Congo, pursued by anthropophagous pygmies who had once existed either in the reality of that far jungle or in the fevered mind of her strange and needy visitor, Evelyn could not know which. And then she dug. For two hours she dug; her young limbs strong from hockey, she tore a steadily widening, steadily deepening hole out of the earth in the center of the clearing in the midst of the rhododendron bushes at the bottom of the garden. And when she was finished she lined the hole with the tent. And then she burned that old map of his, creased and sweat-stained; she set it afire with the odd vestas he had left on the folding stool, and the ashes fell into the pit. And then she tossed in the gun, having hauled it with a sob from the dead man’s waistband; and then the flask and the oil lamp, and then the man himself, into his grave, but not unmourned, and maybe this is all that any of us can ask for.

She saw him, occasionally, in the months that followed, always from her bedroom window when the moon was up. He’d be standing at the goldfish pond, his face pale and gleaming in the moonlight and his hands twitching at his sides. He’d look up at her window and she’d slowly move her palm back and forth in greeting. And though the fever was still upon him, he seemed no longer in mortal fear of the pygmies—yes, a subtle theme of peace had entered the symphony of his diseased being, if being indeed he was. Perhaps, after all, he was nothing; Evelyn began to see him less and less frequently after that, and at around the time—she’d have been about fourteen-and-a-half then—the time she decided to become a doctor, he disappeared from her life completely, and she never saw him again.

Nineteenth-century Imperialism, as Lenin under-stood it, appeared when the great European capitalists began to have difficulty finding sound investment opportunities for their superfluous wealth at home. They turned to Africa and the East, and backed by the armed might of the state and an ideology of racial superiority proceeded to expand. Expansion bred competition, and competition bred war. War, of course, breeds only death, and death breeds nothing except maybe flowers and vegetables, which are good only for antiquated agricultural economies. What this rather gloomy analysis tends to ignore, however, is Imperialism’s other face, which is indeed more properly the preserve of fiction. This is the soft face of Imperialism, and it concerns itself with human relationships, and individual psychology—and not least with the education of the senses. For it was in the torrid climates of the various far-flung corners of the Empire that many Europeans first confronted the nature of passion. Frequently the experience proved liberating, and the traveler emerged from the glowing crucible a richer, wiser, and more fully rounded human being. But occasionally, the encounter of East and West, of the sensual and the rational, did not resolve so satisfactorily. Occasionally, darker forces seemed to be at work, forces committed to discord and antipathy between the races. The Black Hand of the Raj was one such force.

It is a warm night in the spring of 1897, and gazing at the stars from the upper deck of a P & O liner bound for Bombay stands a young woman named Lucy Hepplewhite. Her hands rest lightly upon the rough dark wood of the rail, and her face is bathed in moonlight. A soft breeze lifts the delicate tassels of the lace mantilla she has thrown about her shoulders, and gently ruffles the curls escaping from her piled tresses. Her dark eyes are misted and shining, and from between her soft lips small pearly teeth gleam like stars. But what is it that brings now a gentle smile to those ripe lips? What is she thinking of, this flower of Victorian maidenhood, as she turns her gaze to the gleaming surface of the darkly heaving waters below? She is thinking of the altar. She is thinking of love. For she is going to India to marry a young man in the Indian Civil Service to whom she became engaged some six months previously. His name is Cecil Pym, and he occupies an important post in Poonah. It is there that the happy couple will be married, and afterwards honeymoon elsewhere in the hill country. The prospect arouses in Lucy a strange excitement, a vague and delicious warmth that she is hesitant to define; then the sea breeze freshens and she turns, with a last glance at the moonlit swells, and goes below, leaving the deck deserted.

The voyage was uneventful for the most part, and Lucy amused herself with a little bridge, an occasional game of deck quoits, and pleasant expectations of connubial bliss with Cecil. The prospect of life in India had never unduly alarmed her; however, as the great vessel slipped down the Suez Canal, the weather grew uncomfortably warm and brought an immoderate flush to her pale cheek. She retired to her cabin and was troubled, for the first time in her life, by thoughts that were less than spotlessly pure. And in that moment the first faint whisper of a doubt as to how she would cope with the weather began to disturb her serenity.