Under the Volcano (23 page)

 
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 assistant 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. Nobody 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 passed 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 scrap 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 manuscripts 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--God 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 illustrated to his goggling history class 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 passionately 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. God almighty. Good God 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 dogging 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 assured 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 pass 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 asses'-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 cockroaches 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 Tomalín. But he'd
left the radio playing on the porch; probably she could hear no more than the
usual bathroom babel.
   
"Tit for tat," the Consul,
still trembling, commented, when Hugh had assisted him back to his chair.
"I did that for you once."
   
"Sí, hombre! Hugh, lathering the
brush again on the asses'-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'