The Pritchett Century (39 page)

He stood looking up at the darkness and the words came to him, “My luck has gone.” He saw in the darkness the lighted room, the two women, and then beyond them hundreds of small fragments, glittering, out of his own life and his father like a shadow thrown upon it all.
He felt again what he had felt intermittently during the past six months, that he had no longer a self, that he was scattered, disintegrated—nothing.

Then the jaguar returned and sat down in the rim of light and its eyes were as brilliant as motionless lamps.

“God!” exclaimed Johnson and, without thought, advanced running towards the creature with a burning root in his hand, shouting, “Get out, you fool! I’ll beat your brains out if you don’t clear out.” He raised the torch of shrub high as he ran, shouting. The animal turned tail and sprang before him into the scrub breaking down the branches, and Johnson went after it. For fifty yards he ran and roosting birds clapped up in the dark. The ground rose and he heard the tiger still springing far away. And then Johnson dropped his arm in amazement. There was the river streaming in the rising moon within a hundred and fifty yards of the camp. There was the creek bank. He looked back. The camp which had seemed to be on rising ground was in a wide hollow and its light was invisible. The river was exactly in the direction from which he thought he and Wright had come after the accident.

He ran back to the camp. He marked the direction by the brand; and with rough care for Wright he knelt down and got him on his back. His weight was dead. Staggering with the man he made in the direction of the river. Wright groaned as he jolted over the rough ground.

There was no sign of the jaguar, no answer to his shout as he stood on the shore.

He paddled out to midstream to be in the path of the rising moon. “Then it must be nearly midnight.” No action or sensation of Johnson was nervously harassed or feverish. His struggle with the weight of Wright, his staggering blindly through the bush, his guilt, his visions of Wright’s home and of his own life, culminating in the words, “My luck has gone,” he experienced slowly and laboriously. He passed through this suffering like an ox.

The current was with him. On the blank surface of the air were scratched the thin night-piping and croaking of water birds, but as the moon came up the surface began to glimmer. Faintly at first his shadow and the shadow of the gunwale were placed like hands upon the form of Wright and his face took on a deeper waxen whiteness.

“You’re all right now. We’re there,” Johnson said. The warm wash of moonlight unclosed into a radiance rich like the whiteness of a lily and the river became like a white path of voluptuous funereal marble between cypresses in some southern cemetery. The night was warm.

All Johnson’s thoughts were fixed on the camp, estimating the distance, noting landmarks, his eyes constantly searching for the gleam of the fire. Not for one moment did he think, “This is the end of the expedition,” but he thought of the journey back to Calcott’s town and who would take Wright there. To him every one of his paddle-strokes was something that detained Wright from dying. He was confident of his judgement though his luck had gone. His anxiety was that the others, who had not apparently come out to look for him, should have let their fire go out.

Presently, far ahead of him, he heard a shot. It came from far down the river and, seemingly, from the opposite bank to the one where the camp was. He took his gun and fired in answer to it. An answer quickly came. He paddled rapidly.

“They’re here,” he said.

Wright began to gasp and rave and then fell quiet.

Where the hell are they? What are they doing down there?

A strong smell of burning wood hung over the river, dry and acrid. It blew over from the opposite bank. He passed—he remembered it—the opening of a wide creek—and suddenly voices were plain. They were coming from the creek. Loudly another shot sounded. It was from the creek. He paused and shouted. He shouted several times. The voices came confusedly over the water and then there was an answering shout. He turned the canoe towards the sound and as he approached the creek mouth he saw their boat come down. Again he shouted and now there was no doubt about it. They called, and from under the fantastic shadows of the branches, the men rowing in the bows, the black craft appeared with Phillips and Silva standing in it. Then there’s no one in the camp. The fools. Any animal may have pinched the stores.

They came alongside.

“Don’t run me down,” Johnson said. “There’s been an accident. It’s Wright. He’s got shot.”

Phillips and Silva looked down into the canoe. “We’ve been searching for you. The trees were fired opposite and we thought you were up the creek, cut off.”

“Don’t move him. But let’s get to the camp quickly. Where is it?”

The men in the boat were silent. The Brazilians gazed down at the figure of Wright. “He’s dead,” they said among themselves. Feverishly they rowed over and Johnson went ahead of them, the two parties shouting across the water.

They arrived as Johnson was pulling his canoe into the shore. They jumped into the water, ignoring their boat to crowd round the canoe.

“Look after the boat,” Johnson said. Two went shouting after it into the current to tie it up.

“He’s unconscious,” said Johnson. “Lift him carefully. It’s the chest. He’s lost blood.”

Easily they lifted him ashore and laid him on their coats on the ground. They switched on their torches. The men were called to make up the fire. Johnson and Phillips knelt beside him and Silva was opening the medicine-box.

“Harry,” said Phillips in a startled voice. “He’s not unconscious. He’s dead.”

They both stared at the white face, the staring eyes, the protruding neck. “He’s alive. He was speaking in the canoe.” But when they felt the pulse and listened for the heart and put a mirror to his lips, they knew he was dead.

They stood up and all gathered round. Their torches played in balls of light about their feet and they stood in the vivid whiteness of the moon, looking speechlessly into one another’s faces.

(1937)

Twenty-five minutes from the centre of London the trees lose their towniness, the playing fields, tennis courts, and parks are as fresh as lettuce, and the train appears to be squirting through thousands of little gardens. Here was Boystone before its churches and its High Street were burned out and before its roofs were stripped off a quarter of a mile at a time. It had its little eighteenth century face—the parish church, the alms-houses, the hotel, the Hall—squeezed by the rolls and folds of pink suburban fat. People came out of the train and said the air was better—Mr. Beluncle always did; it was an old town with a dormitory encampment, and a fizz and fuss of small private vegetation.

The Beluncles were always on the lookout for better air. Mr. Beluncle moved them out to Boystone from the London fume of Perse Hill when Henry was fourteen and had a bad accent picked up at half a dozen elementary schools.

“Aim high,” said Mr. Beluncle, “and you’ll hit the mark.”

He wrote to six of the most expensive Public Schools in England and read the prospectuses in the evening to his family, treating them as a kind of poetry; blew up when he saw what the fees were, said,
“Every week I pick up the paper and see some boy from Eton or Harrow has been sent to prison, dreadful thing when you think what it cost their fathers,” and sent his boys to Boystone Grammar School.

The Beluncle boys lifted their noses appreciatively. The air was notably better than at Perse Hill Road. They were shy, reserved, and modest boys who kept away from one another in school hours and who rarely came home together. When they saw one another, they exchanged deep signals out of a common code of seriousness and St. Vitus’s dance. “We are singular,” they twitched. “No one understands us. We have a trick up our sleeves, but it is not time to play it.” They separated and carried on with their shyness which took the form of talking their heads off.

The Beluncles talked with the fever of a secret society.

O’Malley was the frightening master at Boystone School. There was always silence when he came scraping one sarcastic foot into the room, showing his small teeth with the grin of one about to feast off human vanity.

He was a man of fifty with a head like an otter’s on which the hair was drying and dying. He had a dry, haylike moustache, flattened Irish nostrils. He walked with small, pedantic, waltzing steps, as though he had a hook pulling at the seat of his trousers and was being dandled along by a chain. Mr. O’Malley was a terrorist. He turned to face the boys, by his silence daring them to move, speak, or even breathe. When he had silenced them, he walked two more steps, and then turned suddenly to stare again. He was twisting the screw of silence tighter and tighter. After two minutes had passed and the silence was absolute, he gave a small sharp sniff of contempt, and put his hands under the remains of his rotting rusty gown and walked to his desk.

One afternoon in the spring term, after the French period, O’Malley went straight to his desk in a temper and said in an exact and mocking voice:

“I have been asked by the headmaster,” he said, “to inquire into your private lives. This is deeply distasteful to me, as a matter of principle. I do not consider, as I have told the headmaster, it is desirable to encroach on anyone’s private affairs; nevertheless I am obliged to do so. Eh?” he suddenly asked.

The silence, beginning to slacken, suddenly tightened again.

“I am not going to have my history period wrecked by a piece,” Mr. O’Malley’s voice gave a squeal of temper, “of bureaucratic frivolity. I intend to get through this quickly. And,” Mr. O’Malley’s voice now became musical, sadistic, and languid, “any de-lays will in-ev-it-ably lead to three hours detention on Sat-ur-day for the whole form.”

A delighted smile came on Mr. O’Malley’s face, an open grin that raised his moustache. The otter seemed to be rising through the ripples.

“In alphabetical order I shall ask each boy in turn to tell me what he intends to do when he leaves this school and what religious denomination he belongs to. The replies,” said Mr. O’Malley with scorn, “as to all official inquiries will, of course, be either dishonest or meaningless.”

Mr. O’Malley opened a large red book. He looked like a man with knife and fork ready to enjoy an only too human meal.

“I’ll take it alphabetically,” he said, talking with his pen in his mouth. “Anderson—what will Anderson do when he leaves school?”

“Clerk, sir,” said Anderson.

“Clerk, sir,” mocked Mr. O’Malley. “And what does Anderson think his religion is?”

“Church of England, sir,” said Anderson.

“Church of England,” said Mr. O’Malley, taking his pen out of his mouth and making a note of it. “Agnew?”

“Clerk and Church of England, sir.”

“Alton? Clerk and Church of England?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir. Liar, sir,” said Mr. O’Malley.

“Yes, sir.”

“Andrews? Clerk and Church of England?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Liar, sir,” said Mr. O’Malley savagely. “Next, sir? Come on, sir. Baker, sir?”

Henry Beluncle saw the question coming towards him. For the first time in his life, he saw coming to him a chance he had often dreamed of: a chance to play the Beluncle trick. On the subject of religion the
Beluncles were experts. The word “God” was one of the commonest in use in their family. It was a painful word. Its meaning was entangled in family argument. The deity was like some elderly member of the family, shut in the next room, constantly discussed, never to be disturbed, except by Mr. Beluncle himself who alone seemed jolly enough to go in and speak to Him. God was a kind of manager and an interminable conversationalist; a huge draft of capricious garrulity always emerged.

For God, in the Beluncle family, was always changing His mind. Once God had been a Congregationalist; once a Methodist. He had been a Plymouth Brother, the several kinds of Baptist, a Unitarian, an Internationalist; later, as Mr. Beluncle’s business became more affluent, he had been a Steiner, a Theosophist, a New Theologian, a Christian Scientist, a Tubbite, and then had changed sex after Mrs. Eddy to become a follower of Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Beale, Mrs. Klaxon, and Mrs. Parkinson—ladies who had deviated in turn from one another and the Truth. He had never been a Roman Catholic or a Jew.

Only once—it was just before the deity’s change of sex, Henry seemed to recall—had there been no God in the Beluncle family. It had been a period of warmth and happiness. They had all had a seaside holiday that year, the only holiday in the history of the family. Mr. Beluncle himself had gone winkling. On Saturday afternoons Mr. Beluncle went for walks with his arm round Mrs. Beluncle’s waist. There was fried fish in the evenings, a glass of stout now and then, and hot rides in char-à-bancs to commons where strong-scented gorse grew and people came home singing. The air smelled of cigars. Mrs. Beluncle was amorous and played the piano. Mr. Beluncle read booklets on salmon fishing—there being a canal at the back of the house—and Mrs. Beluncle used scent and was always warm-eyed, hot in the face, and had frilly blouses on Sundays. Up a tree in the garden, Henry and his brother George smoked pipes made out of elderberry wood and left notes for little girls under stones in neighbouring gardens.

And then, as on a long summer afternoon, when the castle of delicate and crinkled white cloud that lies remote without moving over the thousand red roofs of a bosky suburb, swells and rises and turns
into the immense and threatening marble mass of impending thunder, and there is the first grunt of a London storm, God came back. A book called
Productive Prayer
, in a red cover, three and sixpence post free, came into Mr. Beluncle’s soft hands. It was followed by one bearing the photograph of a fearless young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, called
Christ: Salesman
, and then by a pearl grey volume called
The Key to Infinity
. God came back but He had been cleaned of impurities: He was called Mind.

The simple change from God to Mind was like the change from gas to electric light to the Beluncles. Mrs. Beluncle dropped out of the discussion at the first contact. She did not understand what “this here Mind” was; for the first time in her life she was prevented from confusing theological argument by diversions into autobiography. There was an assuaging notion that whereas even Mr. Beluncle could not presume to be on equal terms with God, who according to the Bible was violent, jealous, revengeful, and incalculable, he could (as the leading mind of the family) know Mind in the natural course of business and affairs.