Contango (Ill Wind) (24 page)

He could not guess what it had been until the morning, when, after hours
of partly conquered horror, he went to the horse again and saw, in the first
light of dawn, an appalling transformation. The beast stood forlornly where
he had tethered it the night before, but its sides and hindquarters were
ribboned with blood, and its whole carcass was shrunken like a deflated
bladder. There was no interest or vitality in its wandering, hot-lidded eyes.
He tried to think what could have happened; at first he pictured an attack by
some marauding jaguar, but there was no sign of serious flesh-
wounding—merely an immense loss of blood and that look of deathly
exhaustion. Then he remembered the scramble of wings in the night, and the
thing that had touched him as it fled. Was there no limit of hideousness in
these forest secrecies? He was not particularly squeamish, and he had few
physical compunctions, but the idea of this vampire creature gorging itself
on blood throughout the long black hours, stirred him to an icy shiver.

Grimly he tended the suffering animal, relit the fire to boil water, and
packed for the day’s journey. But there was no zest in what he did,
despite his anxiety to be off; he felt that part of himself was still too
numb to take in the full unpleasantness of the situation. A further shock
awaited him when he mounted to ride away; the horse half-turned to him
beforehand, as if in warning of the inevitable, and then, since he persisted,
collapsed gently where it stood. He was torn between sympathy and a sudden
cold lunge of personal fear. He made the horse get up, but did not attempt to
mount again. Since it could not carry him, it must carry the baggage and be
led; and if the forest ended soon, perhaps all would be well. Or perhaps
there was a native village not far ahead, where he could buy another animal.
Surely he must be near some exit from this appalling country. He dragged the
horse for a little distance before remembering to take compass bearings; then
he found that he had been heading south-east instead of west. That small loss
of time, space, and energy sent him into a passion of rage; he doubled back
on his tracks and returned to the spot where lay the remains of his burnt-out
fire. To be there again, seeing his own recent footprints, lifted him to
panic; he swerved blindly into the new direction, crashing through the
thickets, and so keen to thrust the yards behind him that he did not even
brush away the always hovering insects. He grew quieter after a while, and
halted at the first stream to fill up his water-bottle. The horse browsed
placidly while he stooped over the pool; it was so weak that he did not
trouble to tie it up. He was right in thinking the precaution unnecessary,
for when he turned round he saw that it had slid to the ground and that flies
already clustered over it in evil-looking rosettes.

The horse died and he was alone. There by the pool amidst the heat of
noonday, he forced himself to be very calm and think things out. New reserves
of power came to him at such urgent summoning; he perceived now, even if he
had refused to accept the fact before, that he was matched against a very
considerable adversary. He sorted out his baggage and made various careful
decisions. There were still left a few handfuls of rice and coffee and a
score or more matches. The shot-gun and revolver were absolute necessities.
But the mosquito-net had proved of little use, and as it was cumbersome to
carry, it had better go. He also at this point abandoned the pocket
Theocritus, which so far he had not even opened.

Then he pushed on. He was drenched with sweat, and soon his clothes hung
in shreds, so that the countless stinging insects had access to all parts of
his body. He was thirsty, yet he did not dare to empty his water-bottle with
the deep swigs that he craved. Watching the compass-needle almost
continuously, he staggered forward, bruising his shins against fallen logs,
sinking knee-high into decaying leafage, thrusting aside the straggling pulpy
lianes. If he stopped for a moment he could hear the forest in its full,
drowsing chorus, with his own heart beating time to that whirr of insect-life
and that faint whisper of tree-tops under the scorching sun. The whole green
world lay hushed and trance-like, awaiting the mysterious liveliness of
night.

By afternoon he was aware that his chief preoccupation was thirst. It
mattered more now than any ticks, snakes, tarantulas, or vampire-bats; it lay
over him in raw, enveloping desire, nourished by every step. His water-bottle
was empty; he had sipped its last drops with exquisite niggardliness, and now
his throat and lips were beginning to be like flame. Yet there was such ripe
greenness everywhere that it seemed impossible that he could go far without
finding some pleasant oozing mud with a stream trickling through the middle
of it. Pictures such as that began to obsess his mind till he could almost
believe them real, and could think that he heard the sound of a bubbling
rivulet beyond the next limit of sight. He wondered if there were leaves or
stems from which he could suck the juices; he wondered also what a death from
thirst would be like. Then his mind began to play over the past and present
in hot, roving confusion, and he thought of his horse, and that shed at
Maramba full of shattered bodies, and the lights of Rio, and New York, and a
glass of beer at a restaurant…. His brain swung dizzily at that last summit
of bliss, and he felt something give way under him; he staggered and fell on
his knees, staring at the tangled, rich-hued greenery through which small
shafts of sunlight made lace-like patterns. The load on his back weighed him
down, and the shot-gun, slung over his shoulder, rifle-fashion, had made a
long ridge of sores which the flies constantly attacked. He thought abruptly:
“I am going to die of thirst. Extraordinary! I, Leon Mirsky, formerly
of Rostov-on-Don, sometime lieutenant in the Fifteenth Imperial Hussars, and
lately correspondent in Rio of the ‘New York Mail,’ am about to
die of thirst at a point somewhere between Maramba and San Cristobal, South
America….”

He had his revolver, anyhow, for the last extremity. But surely, surely he
was a long way from that. He had heard of persons going waterless for several
days, and he himself had had less than twelve hours. He upbraided himself for
giving way so soon; at least he must stick it out till the next day. Then,
looking round and upwards, he saw a large bird swooping low overhead, and his
first thought was of the astonishing prescience of vultures. But the bird
passed, and after a moment the same or a similar bird flew back again. Could
it be that there was water near by, some pool to which the bird had flown to
drink? He had noted the direction; it was downhill. With the idea once in his
mind he could almost sniff the water, and all at once he sprang to his feet,
flung his pack and weapons on the ground, and raced forward with arms
outstretched. There was water, and he would find it.

He did. Less than fifty yards away he ran into a sun-caked gully that had
been a stream during the rainy season, but was now a series of slimy puddles.
He lay belly downwards on the edge of one of these and paddled his lips and
face. He lay for many minutes, caring for nothing but the relief of liquid
coursing in the dried canals of his body. Birds came near him to drink, too
thirsty to have fear, or to wait for him to go. Then it grew dark and was
night. He fell asleep, and thousands of ticks and flies had their will of
him. Sometimes, in the midst of wild dreams, he woke suddenly, startled by
the movement of some bird or beast in the pool. He was in pain now, as if
fire was in his stomach; and in the morning he could move only with great
difficulty. His first thought was of the guns and pack which he had left a
short way off in the forest; he must find them, fill up his water-bottle, and
then press onward. He stumbled a few yards into the undergrowth before
realising, with a sort of numbed panic, that he had not the slightest idea
where to look, and that a search of the whole possible radius was far beyond
the limit of his bodily strength.

He slid back into the gully and watched without resentment the flies that
preyed on every inch of his exposed skin. An insect new to him, rather like a
scorpion, approached to within a little space of his arm, and then scurried
away when he made to touch it. His brain felt perfectly clear, clearer than
at any time since that first day after leaving Maramba. He even philosophised
over the flies and insects, reflecting how the health of their small bodies
depended on his own sores and illness, and wondering whether life itself
might not be nourished similarly on some greater, unknown matter in a state
of unhealth. As ticks and microbes were to men, so were men to what? No
answer; just as, perhaps, a bacillus in the cancerous throat of a prima-donna
could have small conception of an aria by Mozart. A universe, then, in which
life was a symptom of pain and breakdown in some larger structure?

He felt quite calmly reconciled to the fact of death, provided only that
it were not to be death of thirst. But then it seemed as if a last malignant
miracle were performed before his eyes, for he looked down at the pool and
saw that it had dried. Somehow he had never thought of that, though it was
really as likely as that puddles dry on city pavements. The last of the green
scum had oozed away during the night, and now the sun was scorching up the
final moisture. A bird swooped down, pecked at the caking mud, and seemed to
share his discomfiture so comically that he burst into a loud laugh and
scared it away. He went on laughing, as at some monstrous Rabelaisian humour,
his finger- nails scrabbling in the cocoa-brown earth. And the cream of the
jest was that his revolver lay somewhere a few yards away—yards that
might as well have been miles. Suddenly, thinking about it, he waved his
fists at the green encircling wall and began to shriek and shriek….

The Oetzler House in New York represented a last-minute
triumph of good taste over wealth. Aged sixty-eight, Oetzler was a sallow,
bald-headed, small- statured German Jew who had sold newspapers as a small
boy, and still, it might be said, sold newspapers. His fortune was reckoned
to be in the seven-figure category, much of it invested in real estate; and
he had the reputation of having forecast the stock-market slump long, perhaps
too long, before it had happened. He was shrewd, acid, a fancier of men
rather than books, and as good a judge of wine as of either. He had gathered
a typical crowd around his dining- table that March
evening—Wolfe-Sutton the banker, Mrs. Drinan the actress, Lanberger
the latest lion among the novelists, Russell just back from the Andes, Lady
Celia Rivers on her way to Hollywood, and so on. Twelve in all, including
himself. His cousin had come up from Long Island to act as hostess; she was
rather “out of things” intellectually, but she made up for it by
a few mundaner talents which the great ones often lacked. Oetzler was just
conventional enough himself to appreciate the fact that introducing people
without getting their names mixed up required brains of a kind, even if one
did prefer the Ziegfeld Chorus to “Strange Interlude.” His
attitude towards his guests was pleasantly cynical; he liked to hear them
talk, and took care never to believe much of anything they said. It was, as
he reckoned it, a shop-window world, in which it would have been a breach of
etiquette to attempt to purchase the goods displayed. The real stuff of the
mind was housed in cellars, where one need not advertise it.

He recognised a familiar scene as he glanced down the table at the
alternating array of creamy neck and white shirt-front. Like most
celebrities, they seemed to him ruthlessly self-centred; their talk spurted
into the air like fireworks, and he was always fascinated to notice how
little real connection the brightest salvos had with anything that had gone
before, yet how cunningly the skilled conversational practitioner could
devise an apparent sequence. And there were several skilled practitioners at
work to-night, he noted. Indeed, he thought it very possible that no more
brilliant talk was being manufactured anywhere in New York at that moment.
The participants were all so cold and experienced; they shot their service so
unerringly over the net; though one did get a little fatigued, as at
tournament tennis, by the constant swivel of attention. Extraordinary fruit
of civilisation, these tricks of verbal jugglery, played for a couple of
hours over the silver and cut glass of a dining-table. To eat and
talk—who had first thought of elaborating the simultaneous technique?
Oetzler was indifferently aware that he himself was but a poor hand at the
game; his words had a distressful habit of meaning something, which was why,
rather than spoil the play, he usually preferred to be a listener. He liked,
for example, to listen to Lanberger talking of the world-slump, envisaging
the breakdown of civilisation as casually as he might announce the discovery
of a new Czecho-Slovakian ballerina. He liked nearly as well to hear
Wolfe-Sutton jauntily seconding a remark which, if true, must necessarily
spell doom for them all; was there something fine, or else merely fatuous, in
the way these people daintily improvised while so many Romes were burning?
The ball of chatter kept on flip- flopping backwards and forwards, never
missing a score, yet just as reliably never getting anywhere; once it seemed
in danger of stopping, but Wolfe-Sutton rescued it at the last moment by
interjecting: “Curious, isn’t it, the growing gulf between what
we can all say, privately like this, and what we dare write and speak in
public? We dope the millions with stuff that doesn’t even win from us a
cynical smile.”

Lanberger, red-haired and bronze-eyed, nodded. “Yes, and our host,
if he won’t mind our being personal, is an example. In his newspapers
he organises optimism like a drill-sergeant, but one of the few people he
can’t influence is himself. Do we count him a hypocrite? Not at all. As
a matter of fact, we hardly notice the discrepancy. We accept the fact that
cheerfulness has to be dished out to the multitude just as we know that a
boxer before a fight daren’t express the least doubt about
winning.”