The Pritchett Century (38 page)

“The poor bloody fellow. The poor bloody fellow,” gasped Johnson.

Then once more he struggled till he got Wright over his shoulder and tottered with him to the top. The blood came on to Johnson’s skin.

The stars had not yet appeared and this night the moon was late in rising. The one pleasure of running through the rough and broken mile to the river’s edge was the freedom from the flies. Bats were flying out of the bushes and the moths were tossing over the thorns. Johnson ran. He was exhausted when he got to the shore and lay breathless for a moment. Then he pulled in the boat and sluiced his hot body and his head with water from the bailing can. He filled it with water and wedging his hat over it to stop the water from spilling, he went back. He could not run now because of the water. But now in the dark the country was so changed that it was hard to find his way. He began to think he had gone too far and wandered back. He shouted. He turned again and at last the moans of Wright brought him to the place.

“I must get you moved before it is dark. I’ll move you soon. Can you hear me? We’ll soon be moving.”

The water had revived Wright. He looked into Johnson’s face and nodded.

What shall I tell them if he dies? What shall I say to his wife and to Lucy? It is my fault, coming up this river. No, it might have happened anyway. It was an accident. What was he doing? I didn’t see. I was halfway up when I heard a shot. On what river? That was not the river you were going by. Why were you on the wrong river? My father died in this country. He went by this place. He might have died in this very place. No one knows where he died. The Indians come here. There are fires of Indians tonight and no bloody moon. If it could have happened on a moonlight night. If I had been up further, this would not have
happened, he wouldn’t have found me today. This is Lucy. This is the ruin Lucy has brought on me. No, it was an accident.…

“Can you put an arm round my shoulder? I say, can you put an arm round?” He hasn’t strength in his arm. Shall we stay here? Shall I light a fire and the others are bound to come if we do not go back. How is it? He can’t say anything.

There’s a stupidity in the pitiable helplessness of the wounded. Wright moaned.

It is better if he moans. The flies have done. I wonder where the tiger is.

He went down to the creek, into the strange place which was nearly dark now, empty and without sound, where less than an hour before they had been poking in the mud-holes. A fish Wright had speared lay by the guns. The scene was not to be believed. Johnson found himself picking up the dead fish and bringing it back with the guns. He and Wright had seen it flap under the stick but had not even glanced to see it die.

Johnson hated the sight of the two idle guns now and they encumbered him; but he grimly made up his mind that if it killed him and it killed Wright he must carry Wright down to the river. If they waited, Wright, for all he knew, might die. He remade the bandages. The bleeding, he thought, had slackened. As he was putting on his coat Wright spoke and Johnson dropped to his knees to hear.

“Come here …” the voice faded.

“I am here. It’s Harry. You’re all right. I’m here. I’m going to get you down to the river.”

(The wrong river.)

“Lucy …” said Wright.

“It’s me, Harry. Not Lucy,” said Johnson.

God, he’s dying. He’s dying and he’s talking about Lucy, telling me he knows about Lucy. Would you deceive a man who is dying? Johnson knelt, with his face close to Wright’s. The eyes were closed as if he were asleep and he stopped speaking.

I must get him back, dead or alive. I must carry him. Somehow he propped up Wright’s body and, kneeling, got it on his shoulder, grasping him by the legs. He was strong now. He staggered up and stumbled
forward in the thickening darkness under the first stars. He stumbled over roots, he tore his clothes on bushes, fanatically he followed the familiar bush of the creek bank. His shoulders were aching, his tongue out of his open mouth sucked in his sweat. Twice he rested and groped in the bush for sight or sound of the creek.

The stars were brilliant and clear. They shone with miraculous clarity, mapped clearly in their constellations. They placed a definite order before the eyes and one walked in the most marked and munificent light. But this order was in contrast to the confusion of the bush. Each tree where it touched the sky was like a bunch of black spears—each bush, each mass of grasses had this marked black head, clear and dramatic. And a voice seemed to come out of it, saying, “This is the way. You remember this bush, and then the five trees together and the scrub you skirted. You counted the bends and the rises.” Each one stood distinct and black and certain. Johnson hesitated. Crouching under the groaning man, he turned round. Behind him, as before him, was the same array of definite shapes, a multitude of motionless caped figures. He swung round, but it was the same on either side of him. The definite things near by, the stars like tears in the branches, cold and brilliant, the heavens immaculate and lucid in their complexity. He listened for the sound of the river. There was no sound. The sweat went cold in his body. He lowered Wright gently to the ground and, turning with superstition at every pace to keep him in sight, stepped into the gap in the scrub where the creek was. He put his hat down on the gap and walked through.

There was no creek. There were twenty yards of low grass and rock with stones shining in the starlight and then a bank of scrub. This must be the creek. Carefully observing every step, he went to the bank, which was a foot or two higher than the land around him. There was no creek. He saw nothing, no line of bushes which he and Wright had appeared to follow hours earlier. He felt he had been lifted up and taken into country he had never seen before. From where he stood he could see his hat in the gap and he returned to it rapidly, dreading that it would vanish or change before he reached it. He got there. His hand was trembling as he took it and now he made for Wright. The world had opened loneliness upon him. In every direction it seemed certain
that the river lay. The dark bush did not lose the distinctness, the simplicity of its shapes. He looked down upon the pale face of Wright.

“God, I’m a bloody fool,” Johnson said. “How have I done this?” He stood stiff, ripples of coldness passing through his body, unable to decide anything. Once he thought he heard the sound of the river but it was a movement of night breeze sloughing in the distant trees and passing over them like some lost human breathing. He fought with all his slow will the impulse to dash here or there following this certainty and the other.

“Wait. Wait,” he said.

He knelt down beside Wright and talked to him.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll soon be there. I’ll get you down somehow. Just taking a breather.”

Wright’s breathing seemed easier. The pulse was unchanged. The ground, Harry felt, was sodden with dew.

But this trick of calming and distracting himself and then of looking up with an open mind, to see the scene afresh and find conviction in a flash, did not succeed. There was a momentary illusion of vision, then it disolved.

He thought, “Shall I pray?”

If there were someone outside or above, with simple ease this person could point out the path to the river. It would be very simple. He thought, “Our Father which art in Heaven”; no, what’s the use of panicking! I’m not going to wander round in circles. Light a fire. They’ll see that. It can’t be very long before they start searching.

He said, “This is not admitting defeat,” and “Wright will not die.” There is always some other small thing and after that another small thing which can be done before a man dies.

Harry had no watch. He stood trying to calculate the time. He set about lighting a fire, gathering the dry sticks. He took out his matches and his pipe and put it in his mouth. Then he could not, for some reason, smoke while Wright was lying there helpless. He lit the fire and as its light made a glowing room from which the sparks danced, his spirits rose. He did not like the thought of the black, distinct caped figures of the trees behind that unnatural and fluid wall of light. He worked hard collecting and piling on the sticks. The flame went up in a waving
spire. He worked ceaselessly, taking no notice of Wright. “It was an accident. It was an accident.” Branch after branch he brought and made a stack within reach of the fire. His whole life went into making the pile. The fire blazed high, yellow and dancing. Like an animal leaping, some yellow cat, the flame licked up in the dark, sending out claws at the darkness. He looked up and he and Wright seemed to be in a huge glowing temple, higher than the highest trees, wide and palatial. A fire that could be seen for miles. He shouted and listened. There was no answer, yet there had seemed to be a thousand faint answers, the movements of leaves or the scuttlings of night animals. He sat down beside Wright, exhausted, his throat dry; he realised now how his head ached and that he was sick with hunger.

But Johnson could not sit by the fire and wait. “In a moment,” he said, “I will go and look for the river. If I make the fire high it will guide me. I can’t be lost. I can get water for him.”

Wright was murmuring again for water.

“Poor devil. I’ll bring it you. Just getting a breather.” The heat of the fire was strong and flat against his skin. He stared, exhausted, thinking out his plans.

And suddenly it was curiously easy, as if in the darkness a hand behind him guided him through the scrub. And it was near. Nearer than he would have imagined. They were camped, he discovered, within fifty yards—no, it seemed only twenty—from the river. The creek bank and its long clump were just as he remembered. He went down the bank of the river and so great was his joy that he did not even look for signs of the rescuers, but himself put down his hat—now the only thing he had for water—beside him and drank deeply from the river. It was cold and glorious water, so cold that it made his hot lips and his dry mouth sparkle with delight and his body shuddered.

Shuddering, in amazement, he woke up. The fire had gone low. He had dreamed.

He could not tell how long he had slept; it seemed only a few seconds; yet the lowness of the fire showed that it must have been much longer.

“Wright!” he called. “Wright!”

“Thank God,” he said when Wright murmured.

Johnson could not see his face. He jumped up and put more sticks on the fire. His head was throbbing violently. The flame started at once, but now the glow was weary and wretched. His body ached. He heaped on the sticks.

“Good God,” he said. “Where are they?”

He shouted to no answer.

“I must go now,” he said.

He turned to shout again and then he saw he could not go.

Seated like a large dog at the rim of the circle of light, pale and dabbled by it and unmoving, was the jaguar. The animal had, indeed, been many yards nearer when the fire was low, but had turned back when Johnson had awoken and made it up.

Days afterwards, when Johnson could speak to Phillips of the happenings on this night, he said:

“It was the most bloody awful luck that we hadn’t taken the rifle. I damn and curse myself for being such a fool. We shan’t see another and he certainly won’t come to sit and watch us, like that one did, as if we were a pair of clowns in a circus ring.”

Johnson stood still with the branch in his halted hand frowning at the jaguar. Like nearly all animals they are, he knew, afraid of man and avoid him, but there is a point at which fear becomes fascination. If he stepped out of the exorcising circle of firelight and walked out into the dark in search of the river, the animal might recover from his trance and follow him.

“What do you want?” called Johnson sharply.

The creature pricked its ears.

“Clear off,” Johnson shouted.

The jaguar rose and moved nervously away, but fascinated by the fire, did no more than move further round the circle. Once more he sat down like a dog with heavy front paws. Johnson knew he was safe with the fire. His real concern, amounting to a shocked anger with himself, was that he had fallen asleep; his only fear that he had slept for hours and that the camp party had not seen the glow of his fire because it was low. They might have passed hours before.

The life of Wright was the important thing. Harry picked up his gun and fired another shot. The echoes fell in a hard rebounding
shower over the bush. The jaguar started up and crashed away into the darkness. There was the old silence swirling into stillness like a dark pond after a stone has been thrown into it, and the rim of the circle of light had a more sinister loneliness now that its sentinel had gone. It was not a time when it is easy to be patient. One counts the minutes.

There was no answering shot.

Johnson turned to Wright. His lips were cracked and bloodless, his tongue protruding and dry, his eyes staring. He murmured sometimes words and names which Johnson could not catch.

“Why the hell don’t they come!” said Johnson. “Has he got to lie here and die because those fools don’t answer?”

He stood up and fired again.

“They’re coming,” he said to Wright as the echoes rained. But he had no evidence that they were coming.

He cursed them quietly; but he was still most appalled by his own guilt in losing his way and in falling asleep. He was eaten by shame and by horror at himself, his ignorance, his incompetence and his guilt. He walked up and down looking at Wright, maddened by his inability to do anything. In his mind he continually saw a brilliantly lighted room—the drawing-room of Wright’s house in England—and there Mrs Wright was reading and Lucy was standing by the open window. They were talking. Suddenly he was there walking across the room and they got up and walked quickly, exclaiming, towards him. They came very close to him, Lucy was laughing and the laughter and some words passed near to his face and then over and beyond him, and once more the room reappeared as it had been at first, with Mrs Wright and her book and Lucy at the open windows. They got up and came to him as before. Over and over again, with the tireless mechanism of pictures, these two scenes were enacted. He could not shake them out of his mind, as he bent to collect sticks or piled them on the fire or turned round to speak, for his own relief, to Wright. Johnson had never seen a dying man before.