Under the Volcano (3 page)

   
Though it was not the first occasion
the Consul and he had stood looking into an abyss. For there had always been,
ages ago--and how could one now forget it?--the "Hell Bunker': and that
other encounter there which seemed to bear some obscure relation to the later
one in Maximilian's Palace... Had his discovery of the Consul here in
Quauhnahuac really been so extraordinary, the discovery that his old English
playmate--he could scarcely call him "schoolmate"--whom he hadn't
seen for nearly a quarter of a century was actually living in his street, and
had been, without his knowledge, for six weeks? Probably not; probably it was
just one of those meaningless correspondences that might be labelled:
"favourite trick of the gods." But how vividly, again, that old seaside
holiday in England came back to him!
   
--M. Laruelle, who had been born in
Languion, in the Moselle country, but whose father, a rich philatelist of
remote habits, had moved to Paris, usually spent his summer holidays as a boy
with his parents in Normandy. Courseulles, in Calvados, on the English Channel,
was not a fashionable resort. Far from it. There were a few windy battered
pensions, miles of desolate sand-dunes, and the sea was cold. But it was to
Courseulles, nevertheless, in the sweltering summer of 1911, that the family of
the famous English poet, Abraham Taskerson, had come, bringing with them the
strange little Anglo-Indian orphan, a broody creature of fifteen, so shy and
yet so curiously self-contained, who wrote poetry that old Taskerson (who'd
stayed at home) apparently encouraged him with, and who sometimes burst out
crying if you mentioned in his presence the word "father" or
"mother," Jacques, about the same age, had felt oddly attracted to
him: and since the other Taskerson boys--at least six, mostly older and, it
would appear, all of a tougher breed, though they were in fact collateral
relatives of young Geoffrey Firmin--tended to band together and leave the lad
alone, he saw a great deal of him. They wandered together along the shore with
a couple of old "cleeks" brought from England and some wretched
gutta-percha golf balls, to be driven on their last afternoon gloriously into
the sea. "Joffrey" became "The Old Bean." Laruelle mère to
whom, however, he was "that beautiful English young poet," liked him
too. Taskerson mère had taken a fancy to the French boy: the upshot was Jacques
was asked to spend September in England with the Taskersons, where Geoffrey
would be staying till the commencement of his school term. Jacques's father, who
planned sending him to an English school till he was eighteen, consented.
Particularly he admired the erect manly carriage of the Taskersons... And that
was how M. Laruelle came to Leasowe.
   
It was a kind of grown-up, civilized
version of Courseulles on the English north-west coast. The Taskersons lived in
a comfortable house whose back garden abutted on a beautiful, undulating golf
course bounded on the far side by the sea. It looked like the sea; actually it
was the estuary, seven miles wide, of a river: white horses westward marked
where the real sea began. The Welsh mountains, gaunt and black and cloudy, with
occasionally a snow peak to remind Geoff of India, lay across the river. During
the week, when they were allowed to play, the course was deserted: yellow
ragged sea poppies fluttered in the spiny sea grass. On the shore were the
remains of an antediluvian forest with ugly black stumps showing, and farther
up an old stubby deserted lighthouse. There was an island in the estuary, with
a windmill on it like a curious black flower, which you could ride out to at
low tide on a donkey. The smoke of freighters outward bound from Liverpool hung
low on the horizon. There was a feeling of space and emptiness. Only at
week-ends did a certain disadvantage appear in their site: although the season
was drawing to a close and the grey hydropathic hotels along the promenades
were emptying, the golf course was packed all day with Liverpool brokers
playing foursomes. From Saturday morning till Sunday night a continuous hail of
golf balls flying out of bounds bombarded the roof. Then it was a pleasure to
go out with Geoffrey into the town, which was still full of laughing pretty
girls, and walk through the sunlit windy streets or to look at one of the
comical Pierrot shows on the beach. Or best of all they would sail on the
marine lake in a borrowed twelve-foot yacht managed expertly by Geoffrey.
   
For Geoffrey and he were--as at
Courseulles--left much to themselves. And Jacques now understood more clearly
why he'd seen so little of the Taskersons in Normandy. Those boys were
unprecedented, portentous walkers. They thought nothing of walking twenty-five
or thirty miles in a day. But what seemed stranger still, considering none was
above school age, they were also unprecedented, portentous drinkers. In a mere
five-mile walk they would stop at as many "pubs" and drink a pint or
two of powerful beer in each. Even the youngest, who had not turned fifteen,
would get through his six pints in an afternoon. And if anyone was sick, so
much the better for him. That made room for more. Neither Jacques, who had a
weak stomach--though he was used to a certain amount of wine at home--nor
Geoffrey, who disliked the taste of beer, and besides attended a strict
Wesleyan school, could stand this medieval pace. But indeed the whole family
drank inordinately. Old Taskerson, a kindly sharp man, had lost the only one of
his sons who'd inherited any degree of literary talent; every night he sat
brooding in his study with the door open, drinking hour after hour, his cats on
his lap, his evening newspaper crackling distant disapproval of the other sons,
who for their part sat drinking hour after hour in the dining-room. Mrs
Taskerson, a different woman at home, where she perhaps felt less necessity of
making a good impression, sat with her sons, her pretty face flushed, half
disapproving too, but nevertheless cheerfully drinking everyone else under the
table. It was true the boys usually had a head start.--Not that they were the
sort ever to be seen staggering about outside in the street. It was a point of
honour with them that, the drunker they became, the more sober they should
appear. As a rule they walked fabulously upright, shoulders thrown back, eyes
front, like guardsmen on duty, only, towards the end of the day, very very
slowly, with that same "erect manly carriage," in short, that had so
impressed M. Laruelle's father. Even so it was by no means an unusual
occurrence in the morning to discover the entire household sleeping on the
dining-room floor. Yet no one seemed to feel any the worse for it. And the
pantry was always bulging with barrels of beer to be tapped by anyone who did.
Healthy and strong, the boys ate like lions. They devoured appalling messes of
fried sheep's stomachs and pudding known as black or blood puddings, a sort of
conglomerate offal rolled in oatmeal that Jacques feared might be intended at
least partly for his benefit--boudin, don't you know, Jacques--while the Old
Bean, now often referred to as "that Firmin," sat bashful and out of
place, his glass of pale bitter untouched, shyly trying to make conversation
with Mr Taskerson.
   
It was difficult at first to
understand what "that Firmin" was doing at all with such an unlikely
family. He had no tastes in common with the Taskerson lads and he was not even
at the same school. Yet it was easy to see that the relatives who sent him had
acted with the best of motives. Geoffrey's "nose was always in a
book," so that "Cousin Abraham," whose work had a religious
turn, should be the "very man" to assist him. While as for the boys
themselves they probably knew as little about them as Jacques's own family:
they won all the language prizes at school, and all the athletic ones: surely
these fine hearty fellows would be "just the thing" to help poor
Geoffrey over his shyness and stop him "wool-gathering" about his
father and India. Jacques's heart went out to the poor Old Bean. His mother had
died when he was a child, in Kashmir, and, within the last year or so, his father,
who'd married again, had simply, yet scandalously, disappeared. Nobody in
Kashmir or elsewhere knew quite what had happened to him. One day he had walked
up into the Himalayas and vanished, leaving Geoffrey, at Srinagar, with his
half-brother, Hugh, then a baby in arms, and his stepmother. Then, as if that
were not enough, the stepmother died too, leaving the two children alone in
India. Poor Old Bean. He was really, in spite of his queerness, so touched by
any kindness done to him. He was even touched by being called "that
Firmin." And he was devoted to old Taskerson. M. Laruelle felt that in his
way he was devoted to all the Taskersons and would have defended them to the
death. There was something disarmingly helpless and at the same time so loyal
about him. And after all, the Taskerson boys had, in their monstrous bluff
English fashion, done their best not to leave him out and to show him their
sympathy on his first summer holiday in England. It was not their fault if he
could not drink seven pints in fourteen minutes or walk fifty miles without
dropping. It was partly due to them that Jacques himself was here to keep him
company. And they had perhaps partly succeeded in making him overcome his
shyness. For from the Taskersons the Old Bean had at least learned, as Jacques
with him, the English art of "picking up girls." They had an absurd
Pierrot song, sung preferably in Jacques's French accent. Jacques and he walked
along the promenade singing:
   
Oh we allll WALK ze wibberlee
wobberlee WALK
And we alll TALK ze wibberlee wobberlee TALK
And we alll WEAR wibberlee wobberlee TIES
And-look-at-all-ze-pretty-girls-with-wibberlee-wobberlee eyes. Oh
We allll SING ze wibberlee wobberlee SONG
Until ze day is dawn-ing,
And-we-all-have-zat-wibberlee-wobberlee-wobberlee-wibberlee-wibberlee-wobberlee
feeling
 
In ze morning.
   
Then the ritual was to shout
"Hi" and walk after some girl whose admiration you imagined, if she
happened to turn round, you had aroused. If you really had and it was after
sunset you took her walking on the golf course, which was full, as the
Taskersons put it, of good "sitting-out places." These were in the
main bunkers or gulleys between dunes. The bunkers were usually full of sand,
but they were windproof, and deep; none deeper than the "Hell
Bunker." The Hell Bunker was a dreaded hazard, fairly near the Taskersons'
house, in the middle of the long sloping eighth fairway. It guarded the green
in a sense, though at a great distance, being far below it and slightly to the
left. The abyss yawned in such a position as to engulf the third shot of a
golfer like Geoffrey, a naturally beautiful and graceful player, and about the
fifteenth of a duffer like Jacques. Jacques and the Old Bean had often decided
that the Hell Bunker would be a nice place to take a girl, though wherever you
took one, it was understood nothing very serious happened. There was, in
general, about the whole business of
 
"picking up" an air of innocence. After a while the Old Bean,
who was a virgin to put it mildly, and Jacques, who pretended he was not, fell
into the habit of picking up girls on the promenade, walking to the golf
course, separating there, and meeting later. There were, oddly, fairly regular
hours at the Taskersons'. M. Laruelle didn't know to this day why there was no
understanding about the Hell Bunker. He had certainly no intention of playing
Peeping Tom on Geoffrey. He had happened with his girl, who bored him, to be
crossing the eighth fairway towards Leasowe Drive when both were startled by
voices coming from the bunker. Then the moonlight disclosed the bizarre scene
from which neither he nor the girl could turn their eyes. Laruelle would have
hurried away but neither of them--neither quite aware of the sensible impact of
what was occurring in the Hell Bunker--could control their laughter. Curiously,
M. Laruelle had never remembered what anyone said, only the expression on
Geoffrey's face in the moonlight and the awkward grotesque way the girl had
scrambled to her feet, then, that both Geoffrey and he behaved with remarkable
aplomb. They all went to a tavern with some queer name, as "The Case is
Altered." It was patently the first time the Consul had ever been into a
bar on his own initiative; he ordered Johnny Walkers all round loudly, but the
waiter, encountering the proprietor, refused to serve them and they were turned
out as minors. Alas, their friendship did not for some reason survive these two
sad, though doubtless providential, little frustrations. M. Laruelle's father
had meantime dropped the idea of sending him to school in England. The holiday
fizzled out in desolation and equinoctial gales. It had been a melancholy
dreary parting at Liverpool and a dreary melancholy journey down to Dover and
back home, lonesome as an onion peddler, on the sea-swept channel boat to Calais.
   
M. Laruelle straightened, instantly
becoming aware of activity, to step just in time from the path of a horseman
who had reined up sideways across the bridge. Darkness had fallen like the
House of Usher. The horse stood blinking in the leaping headlights of a car, a
rare phenomenon so far down the Calle Nicaragua, that was approaching from the
town, rolling like a ship on the dreadful road. The rider of the horse was so
drunk he was sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, a feat in itself
considering their size, and barely managing to hold on by the reins, though not
once did he grasp the pommel to steady himself. The horse reared wildly,
rebellious--half fearful, half contemptuous, perhaps, of its rider--then it
catapulted in the direction of the car: the man, who seemed to be falling
straight backwards at first, miraculously saved himself only to slip to one
side like a trick rider, regained the saddle, slid, slipped, fell
backwards--just saving himself each time, but always with the reins, never with
the pommel, holding them in one hand now, the stirrups still unrecovered as he
furiously beat the horse's flanks with the machete he had withdrawn from a long
curved scabbard. Meantime the headlights had picked out a family straggling
down the hill, a man and a woman in mourning, and two neatly dressed children,
whom the woman drew in to the side of the road as the horseman fled on, while
the man stood back against the ditch. The car halted, dimming its lights for
the rider, then came towards M. Laruelle and crossed the bridge behind him. It
was a powerful silent car, of American build, sinking deeply on its springs,
its engine scarcely audible, and the sound of the horse's hooves rang out
plainly, receding now, slanting up the ill-lit Calle Nicaragua, past the
Consul's house, where there would be a light in the window M. Laruelle didn't
want to see--for long after Adam had left the garden the light in Adam's house
burned on--and the gate was mended, past the school on the left, and the spot where
he had met Yvonne with Hugh and Geoffrey that day--and he imagined the rider as
not pausing even at Laruelle's own house, where his trunks lay mountainous and
still only half packed, but galloping recklessly round the corner into the
Calle Tierra del Fuego and on, his eyes wild as those soon to look on death,
through the town--and this too, he thought suddenly, this maniacal vision of
senseless frenzy, but controlled, not quite uncontrolled, somehow almost
admirable, this too, obscurely, was the Consul...