Contango (Ill Wind) (21 page)

… When he recovered consciousness a second time it was night, and there
was a full moon in the crimsoned sky. He heard the river lapping near him; he
felt thirsty, and dragged himself a few yards forward to scoop the water into
his hands. Refreshed after that, he stood up, breathing the hot, smoky air,
and saw that sporadic fires had broken out over the ravaged town. Again, in
the face of this new peril, his thought was of Byrne. But his choked lungs
and smarting eyes led hint instinctively away from the vortex to the outer
ring of the inferno. Byrne, alive or dead, might be anywhere here. He
clambered over some wreckage, and as he did so there came a curious tinkling
sound from his feet. “Good God, what’s that?” he whispered,
aloud, and was no less amazed when a cackling laugh answered him and a voice
followed it with: “You play tune, betcherlife, heh?” Then he saw
that his feet had touched the keys of a half-smashed piano, and that a few
yards away a face regarded him with a wide and glittering smile. It was an
ugly face, sagging and pewter-coloured in the moonlight, but at that moment
Nicky was glad to see it. “Hullo, John,” he said, grinning back.
“You one of the lucky ones, too?”

But the Chinese, though possessing a smattering of English, did not appear
to comprehend. He merely continued to smile, jerking his thumb in the
direction of the town, and chattering: “Betcherlife, all velly dead
there, heh?”

Nicky nodded, and was about to pass on when the man strode towards him and
gripped his arm. “You want drink, heh?” He produced a flask and
offered it, with his smile still broadening.

“Thanks.” Nicky swallowed the raw spirit without a second
invitation. It was good, and he felt grateful. “You’re a
sportsman, John,” he said.

But the Chinese would not let him go at that. He hovered about, muttering
and grinning; his English was insufficient to explain the extent of his own
share in the general tragedy, but Nicky guessed that, like himself, he might
be searching the ruins for someone he had known. Nicky felt a keen desire to
show sympathy and friendliness, or at least appreciation of the drink, but
all he could think of was to perform the comic pantomime of smacking his lips
and rubbing his stomach. The Chinese cackled delightedly. There was a sense
in which the very enormity of the catastrophe all around them imposed this
infantile good humour upon the survivors. The springs of the mind were
numbed, and behind the numbness one could be companionable, even jocular. The
Chinese was evidently in such a mood, and Nicky found it easy and pleasant to
respond. He had nothing to offer in return for the drink except a few
cigarettes that had been badly crumpled in his pocket, but the gift proved
highly acceptable. The Chinese produced matches, and they leaned together
amicably over the flame. “Now we go looksee together, heh,
betcherlife!” he gabbled, puffing ecstatically.

They entered thus upon a sort of half-comprehended partnership in the
search of the locality. If either of them found a body he would call the
other’s attention to it, and even in waning moonlight it was easy for
Nicky to decide that none of them could possibly be that of the priest. The
task of the Chinese was naturally more difficult, for there had been many of
his compatriots in Maramba and precise identification could not always be
easy. In several instances he had to examine articles in pockets before he
could pass on with his quest still unfulfilled. During those hours of
probings and ransackings Nicky came quite to like his companion; the man was
so unfailingly jolly, despite the grimness of their joint occupation.
Sometimes they paused to light fresh cigarettes, and once the Chinese offered
another swig of the harsh, but exceedingly heartening, spirit. Nicky wished
they could talk, but he had discovered that the other knew even less English
than had appeared at first—his phrases being more expletive than
meaningful. Still, it was company to have the fellow so near, humming and
muttering as he paddled up to his knees in crumbled stucco. The glow over the
higher parts of the town was fiercer now….

Suddenly there sounded a sharp cry, and a man in uniform, hatless, but
carrying a revolver, came lunging towards them, apparently from nowhere.
Nicky could not comprehend a word of his voluble shouts, but felt
instinctively that the advance was both frenzied and hostile. The man
approached to within a few yards, continuing to shout; while Nicky waited for
him, unable to decide whether it would be worth while to shout back in any of
the languages that he knew. A sense of the growing absurdity of the situation
overspread him, together with regret that he had not learned a few simple
phrases in whatever tongue was spoken by uniformed ruffians in Maramba after
an earthquake. There were times, and this was one, when his mind seemed to
stand a little way off from his body and stare quizzically at a spectacle for
which it did not care to accept responsibility.

Abruptly the oncomer swung round and transferred his shouts to the
Chinese, who—with tact rather than courage, Nicky thought—was
slinking away. Soon the Chinese broke into a scamper, and at that the other
raised his revolver and fired after him instantly.

This had an extraordinary effect on Nicky. He heard the Chinese yelp as he
was hit, and saw him stagger on with a hand held to his thigh. He saw the man
in uniform raise his weapon to fire again, and at that moment the clench of
his own fingers in his pocket reminded him that he was armed himself. And he
was swept with a raw, overpowering indignation. As if there had not been
enough killing. As if there were not enough agony and mutilation amongst
these blood- drenched ruins. All the horrors he had seen during the past
night and day were seen again, far more vividly, in that glimpse of a
Chinaman’s pain; because it was something so needless, heaped so
maddeningly on what had had to happen. He found it unendurable, this
comprehension of the lust and wantonness of things; he yelled as the man was
about to fire again; then, in sheer illogical rage, he drew his own revolver
and pointed it.

The man’s eyes and hand swerved together; and two further shots,
nearly simultaneous, rang out over the moon-grey desolation.

They lay there, the three of them, Nicky and the uniformed man quite close
together, and the Chinese about a dozen yards away, where he had fallen.
Nicky had shot his assailant dead, and the latter, who had fired only a
second earlier, had struck the youth in the groin. He felt little actual
pain, merely a hot, numbing weariness as he drew breath. He did not fear that
his injury was serious, but he knew, without making the effort, that he could
not move away unaided. Something confusing had been done to his inside by
that bullet, he reckoned. He would have to wait till somebody found him, and
the curious thing was that he had full confidence that somebody would.
Probably already there were armies of rescuers on the way—wasn’t
that what always happened after these big disasters? President Hoover would
send a warship, and the League of Nations would vote condolences. Police,
doctors, nurses, Y.M.C.A., all sorts of people would soon begin to arrive.
Also soldiers, firemen, ambulance-men, insurance-assessors, journalists,
photographers, government officials, seismologists—the whole crowd
would be here shortly….

He turned to the dead man near him. Quite dead. A very small patch of
blood stained the tunic over his left breast, that was all. People would call
that a mighty good shot, by Jove, yes. It was the first man he had ever
killed, though once before, in Russia, he had aimed at someone and missed.
And the joke of it was that in this case he hadn’t aimed at all; he
hadn’t really meant to fire even; everything had happened so damned
quickly.

He wondered who the man was. He could not see clearly; the moon had gone
down. But the first smear of dawn was in the eastern sky, like a
child’s breath on a window-pane; he would be able to see everything
soon. There was still that smell of smoke and burning coffee in the air, and
the Chinese was howling softly, like a dog outside a closed door.
“Hello, John,” Nicky cried, and was surprised to hear his own
voice diminished to a whisper.

What a piece of work was man, indeed! And what a still greater piece of
work was a bullet! No marvel of physical excellence, no superbity of brain or
character, could stand against that exquisite fragment of metal. Shakespeare,
Cervantes, Galileo, Mohammed, Goethe, Mozart, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, the
whole who’s-who parade of history, could all be mown down with a
machine- gun in a few minutes.

He wondered what had happened to Byrne. Dead, probably. He had liked that
man. There had been some point in knowing him. That was the drawback to most
intimacies; you came to like people, you got wildly keen about them, and then
suddenly realised that you had wasted a lot of energy over emotions that
didn’t matter. But knowing Byrne hadn’t been like that. Indeed,
it was as if, in knowing him, one had been on the brink of knowing something
else….

It was lighter now, and he could see the Chinese quite clearly against the
rosy-tinted sky. The man was lying on his face, and his pockets had
emptied—there were coins and purses and a watch and chain. Queer
fellows, Chinamen; but this one had been all right. Nicky wished there were
still enough in the flask for another drink for both of them.

He kept remembering things he thought he had almost forgotten—that
scene, for instance, in the Odessa restaurant that might just as well have
ended in his being shot there and then as here and now. And if he had been,
if that Soviet Commissar had killed him, in what strange ways the world would
have been minutely different—no gyrector experiments in England, no
“Red Desert” at Sabinal, no “Raphael Rassova”
anywhere. And so also, supposing he were now to die, a thousand other remote
and unreckonable things would be withdrawn from possibility. What clue was
there, or wasn’t there any, to this mystic template of men and
bullets?

He looked at the dead man, clear-outlined now in the growing daylight; a
big fellow, with terrific moustaches, and revealed, by a glance at his
uniform, as just a simple soldier—probably one of the local frontier
garrison. On guard? Patrolling? Watching for smugglers across the border?
Then suddenly the idea came…. Good God, it wasn’t contraband the
fellow had suspected, but looting! He had seen the two of them poking about
the wreckage in the middle of the night, and had taken them for thieves! Why,
certainly, it was a likely theory, the likeliest of all, for it explained why
he had fired so promptly when the Chinese made to run away.

As Nicky digested the revelation he was filled with a bemused tenderness
that included now both the Chinese and the dead soldier. So it had all, then,
been a mistake, a pardonable misunderstanding, nobody’s fault but that
of the bullets for boring so fast and so far? If he and the soldier had had
only sticks in their hands, they would now be apologising to each other for
bruises instead of draining their blood into the dust. And the thought came
to him that if ever, some day, mankind should invent a machine big and
powerful enough to destroy the whole world, it would probably be touched off
in just such casual error. He wished he could bring the dead man back to
life, if only to talk to him about it, and he would have liked to shout, if
his voice had been strong enough: “I say, John, this fellow thought we
were a couple of looters—that’s why he was so ready with his
gun!”

And then another thought occurred, of such benign simplicity that he
accepted it with astonishment that it had come only so late. The Chinaman was
a looter. Why, of course, he must be. The way he had been searching the
pockets of the victims, and that fine collection of swag that lay beside him
now, spilled from his pockets. Nicky found himself wanting to smile.
“John, you old rogue,” he cried to himself, “you took me in
all right. Reckon I was dazed with that knock on the head, or I’d have
spotted your game!” Then he looked at the Chinese, who had ceased to
yelp and was lying quite still; and he suddenly knew that he was dead.

The sun rose, comforting at first, but soon too hot to the throat and
lips; a drink was all that he really wanted now. In the sunlight he saw what
he had missed before—a stream of his own blood, seeping away from his
side across a large flat stone. The stream moved slowly, replenished from the
wound, but the stone was warm and the blood readily congealed. He thought,
watching it: “If it gets to the edge, I shall die; if it doesn’t,
I shall live.” That made everything so much easier to understand. It
was a faith, anyhow, a philosophy, a theory of the universe, cause and effect
linked together no more illogically than in the long, invisible chain of
human destiny. He went on watching: a slight stir of his body lent a swell to
the viscous tide; it rolled faster for a while, a red, advancing caterpillar.
And he thought, with certitude: “I am dying by inches… literally by
those inches.” …

Then his brain, that had always been poised hawk-like over words, swooped
down and gave him the answer: “Yes, but I have lived by miles.”
…

The phrase pleased him and made him able to absorb more calmly the gusts
and cyclones of pain as they now assaulted. He closed his eyes and wondered
if he could sleep. The stream must nearly have reached the edge by now, but
he wouldn’t bother to look.

Then, at the last, he suddenly remembered Sylvia.

Leon Mirsky rode into Maramba on a white horse five days
after the second earthquake had completed the ruin of the town. He was a
tall, thin, and ascetic- looking person, with a face remarkable for two
things—its smoke- grey, deep-set eyes, and a fair, girlish skin that
even the climate of tropical South America had not yet impaired.
High-cheekboned and slender-nostriled, he had an air of rather unsure
aloofness, as if he did not quite know what to make of anything; and he
certainly did not know what to make of the Maramba earthquake.