Under the Volcano (24 page)

   
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--God 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 buttery. 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 pass 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 passing 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-assurance, 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 Grass. And yet whose unearthly
beauty compelled one to say: God 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
godsent opportunity--the most appalling of nightmares, as if a grown man should
suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr Bultitude 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 puberty. 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, snobberies, 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
amassed 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."
   
"God 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... Bloody 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
God!"
   
(The last time I played it...
Strumming in the King of Bohemia, London. Benskin's Fine Ales and Stouts. And
waking, after passing 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 Nobody. 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 twanging, not even good twanging finally, and had only
been listening out of politeness--twanging--)
   
"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 passed 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: Japanese
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
passenger. 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--)