The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: “Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta’s coffee beans, you used to say they were Maria’s, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern—”

“Has Pedro gone too then?” Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt.

“Yes, thank God!”

“How about the cats?”

“Perro!” the Consul, removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. “Though the garden’s a rajah mess, I’m afraid. We’ve been virtually without a gardener at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming pool too . . . Hear it? It ought to be full to-day.” The drive widened to a small arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the “front” door, actually at the back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-colored tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its chimney on the far left, from which rose a thread of dark smoke, the bungalow looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor. “No. Skullduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leafcutter ants, several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood: the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can—”

Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift aside a tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path:

“Oh Geoffrey! Where’re my camellias?—”

“God knows.” The lawn was divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank. Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They crossed the plank and they were on the “stoop.”

An old woman with a face of a highly intellectual black gnome, the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled out of the “front” door, scraping her feet—the shuffling and the scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms. “Here’s Concepta,” the Consul said. “Yvonne: Concepta. Concepta, Señora Firmin.” The gnome smiled a child-like smile that momentarily transformed its face into an innocent girl’s. Concepta wiped her hands on her apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now, studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more pleasantly “tight” than at any time since just before that blank period last night) Yvonne’s luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de France , Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.—and now the new labels, the newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S. Pennsylvania , Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación. “El otro señor?” he was saying to Conceptata who shook her head with delighted emphasis. “Hasn’t returned yet. All right, Yvonne, I dare say you want your old room. Anyhow Hugh’s in the back one with the machine.”

“The machine?”

“The mowing machine.”

“—por qué no, agua caliente,” Concepta’s soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags.

“So there’s hot water for you, which is a miracle!”

On the other side of the house the view was suddenly spacious and windy as the sea.

Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren’t dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night.

Immediately below them the small chuckling swimming pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the pool’s edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness was wearing off . . .

He glanced absently round the porch which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn’t yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching them down its length. Concepta’s gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock, nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled daybed, nor the uncomfortable stuffed Quixotes tilting their straw mounts on the house wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn’t yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor.

“Concepta knows my habits, you see.” The Consul regarded the tray now on which were two glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, half full, a soda siphon, a jarro of melting ice and the sinister-looking bottle, also half full, containing a dull red concoction like bad claret, or perhaps cough mixture. “However this is the strychnine. Will you have a whiskey and soda? . . . The ice seems to be for your benefit anyway. Not even a straight wormwood?” The Consul shifted the tray from the parapet to a wicker table Concepta had just brought out.

“Good heavens, not for me, thank you.”

“—A straight whiskey then. Go ahead. What have you got to lose?”

“. . . Let me have some breakfast first!”

“—She might have said yes for once,” a voice said in the Consul’s ear at this moment with incredible rapidity, “for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk all over again don’t you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne’s long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there’s nothing in it,” the voice gabbled on, “has in itself created the most important situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with it,” the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar, perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added severely, “but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn’t you did you didn’t you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control she does not and cannot appreciate!”

“I don’t feel you believe in the strychnine somehow,” the Consul said, with quiet triumph (there was an immense comfort however in the mere presence of the whiskey bottle) pouring himself from the sinister bottle a half-tumblerful of his mixture. I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure. “Neither do I believe in the strychnine, you’ll make me cry again, you bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in, O idiot!” That was yet another familiar and the Consul raised his glass in token of recognition and drank half its contents thoughtfully. The strychnine—he had ironically put some ice in it—tasted sweet, rather like cassis; it provided perhaps a species of subliminal stimulus, faintly perceived: the Consul, who was still standing, was aware too of a faint feeble wooling of his pain, contemptible . . .

“But can’t you see you cabrón that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine the intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on the whiskey instead of later not on the tequila where it is by the way all right all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end nor on the mescal which would be the end though a damned good end perhaps but whiskey the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire of your wife’s ancestors nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you might perhaps have some beer good for you too and full of vitamins for your brother will be here and it is an occasion and this is perhaps the whole point for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whiskey and later the beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must but everyone knows it’s dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh’s good work of straightening you out of course you would!” It was his first familiar again and the Consul sighing put the tumbler down on the tray with a defiantly steady hand.

“What was that you said?” he asked Yvonne.

“I said three times,” Yvonne was laughing, “for Pete’s sake have a decent drink. You don’t have to drink that stuff to impress me . . . I’ll just sit here and cheer.”

“ What? ” She was sitting on the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocatepetl was almost wholly obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the mountain by several trains running parallel. “Will you say that again?” The Consul took her hand.

They were embracing, or so it all but seemed, passionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed, plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets . . .

“No, I’ll stick to the old medicine, thanks.” The Consul had almost fallen backwards onto his broken green rocking chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when—but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: tok: help: help: the swimming pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said:

Arturo Díaz Vigil

Médico Cirujano y Partero

Enfermedades de Niños

Indisposiciones Nerviosas

Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7

Av. Revolución Número 8.

“—Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?” the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.

“Here I am, aren’t I?” Yvonne said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge.

“Strange,” the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: “You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I’ll cry, O idiot!” “Yet it’s awfully courageous of you. What if—I’m in a frightful jolly mess, you know.”

“But you look a ma zingly well I thought. You’ve no idea how well you look.” (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: “Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!”) “How do I look?” She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile.

“Didn’t I say?” The Consul watched her. “Beautiful . . . Brown.” Had he said that? “Brown as a berry. You’ve been swimming,” he added. “You look as though you’ve had plenty of sun . . . There’s been plenty of sun here too of course,” he went on. “As usual . . . Too much of it. In spite of the rain . . . Do you know, I don’t like it.”

“Oh yes you do, really,” she had apparently replied. “We could get out in the sun, you know.”

“Well—”

The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she’d told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, “She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful”: at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she’d married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps just about to be, “beautiful”: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin. Yvonne’s was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper’s lost command, seen through the barroom window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate blue travelling suit: it had not been he.

Suddenly with a quietly impatient gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash of chords. The Consul found his dark glasses and put them on almost playfully. But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice:

“Hugh ought to be here before very long if he comes back by the first bus.”

“What time is the first bus?”

“Half past ten, eleven.” What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone’s arrival unless they were bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne’s coming while she slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh’s arrival was to be dreaded the issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe’s famous church bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her wedding ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for their benefit? The swimming pool ticked on. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

“It’s still only eight-thirty.” The Consul took off his glasses again.

“Your eyes, you poor darling—they’ve got such a glare,” Yvonne burst out with: and the church bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had stumbled.

“A touch of the goujeers . . . Just a touch.” Die glocke glocke tönt nicht mehr . . . The Consul traced a pattern on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet (sockless not because as Sr. Bustamente the manager of the local cinema would have it, he’d drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the strychnine, damn the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar. She bit her lips, intent on the garden:

“Geoffrey, this place is a wreck!”

“Mariana and the moated grange isn’t in it.” The Consul was winding his wrist watch. “. . . But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandon a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it—there’s something about my analogy I don’t like, but never mind, suppose you do it—then you can’t very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?”

“But I didn’t abandon—”

“Even, I wouldn’t say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule.” The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. “Eh?”

“—Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before.”

“No.” The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whiskey bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: “You wouldn’t have. Because it isn’t a cardinal.”

“Of course that’s a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It’s like a bit of flame!” Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. “There, on the hibiscus!”

The Consul closed one eye. “He’s a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He’s a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal.”

“I’m sure it’s a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!”

“Have it your own way. Trogon ambiguus ambiguus is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal.” The Consul reached out toward the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgetting midway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn’t one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still further forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said:

“Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon.”

“He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment—” Yvonne’s voice quivered.

The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket.

For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts.

The water still trickling into the pool—God, how deadeningly slowly—filled the silence between them . . . There was something else; the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Pariah: that meant drums too. Parián. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannon-balls crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the timberline of Popocatepetl as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did not know him. Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the Argentinian ambassador’s week-end residence was slashing his way through some tall grasses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad leaves of the plantains themselves drooping gently seemed menacingly savage as the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish. It was as though the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost stopped beating.

As a matter of fact the telephone was ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining room where, afraid of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating, into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly—for it was a trunk call—not knowing what he was saying, hearing Tom’s muted voice quite plainly but turning his questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil pour into his eardrums or his mouth: “All right. Good-bye . . . Oh, say, Tom, what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday denied by Washington? I wonder where it came from . . . What started it. Yes. All right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all they own it. Or don’t they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes that’s all right, that’s all right. Good-bye; good-bye!” . . . Christ. What does he want to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America. Erikson 43.

Christ . . . He hung up the receiver the wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in the bathroom . . .

The Consul was guiltily climbing the Calle Nicaragua.

It was as if he were toiling up some endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretched on forever into the distance like a life of agony. He thought: 900 pesos=100 bottles of whiskey=900 ditto tequila. Argal: one should drink neither tequila nor whiskey but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to the left before you reached Jacques’ house, leafy, no more than a carttrack at first, then a switchback, and somewhere along that lane to the right, not five minutes’ walk, at a dusty corner, waited a little cool nameless cantina with horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white tomcat sleeping below the counter of whom a whiskerando would say: “He ah work all night mistair and sleep all day!” And this cantina would be open.

This was where he was going (the lane was plainly in sight now, a dog guarding it) to have in peace a couple of necessary drinks unspecified in his mind, and be back again before Yvonne had finished her bath. It was just possible too of course that he might meet—

But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him.

The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street.

—Hugh, is that you old chap lending the old boy a hand? Thank you so much. For it is perhaps indeed your turn these days to lend a hand. Not that I haven’t always been delighted to help you! I was even delighted in Paris that time you arrived from Aden in a fix over your carte d’identité and the passport you so often seem to prefer travelling without and whose number I remember to this day is 21312. It perhaps gave me all the more pleasure in that it served a while to take my mind from my own tangled affairs and moreover proved to my satisfaction, though some of my colleagues were even then beginning to doubt it, that I was still not so divorced from life as to be incapable of discharging such duties with dispatch. Why do I say this?—Is it in part that you should see that I also recognize how close Yvonne and I had already been brought to disaster before your meeting! Are you listening, Hugh—do I make myself clear? Clear that I forgive you, as somehow I have never wholly been able to forgive Yvonne, and that I can still love you as a brother and respect you as a man. Clear, that I would help you, ungrudgingly, again. In fact ever since Father went up into the White Alps alone and failed to return, though they happened to be the Himalayas, and more often than I care to think these volcanoes remind me of them, just as this valley does of the Valley of the Indus, and as those old turbaned trees in Taxco do of Srinigar, and just as Xochimilco—are you listening Hugh?—of all places when I first came here, reminded me of those houseboats on the Shalimar you cannot remember, and your mother, my stepmother died, all those dreadful things seeming to happen at once as though the in-laws of catastrophe had suddenly arrived from nowhere, or, perhaps, Damchok, and moved in on us bag and baggage—there has been all too little opportunity to act, so to say, as a brother to you. Mind you I have perhaps acted as a father: but you were only an infant then, and seasick, upon the P and O, the old erratic Cocanada . But after that and once back in England there were too many guardians, too many surrogates in Harrogate, too many establishments and schools, not to mention the war, the struggle to win which, for as you say rightly it is not yet over, I continue in a bottle and you with the ideas I hope may prove less calamitous to you than did our father’s to him, or for that matter mine to myself. However all this may be—still there, Hugh, lending a hand?—I ought to point out in no uncertain terms that I never dreamed for a moment such a thing as did happen would or could happen. That I had forfeited Yvonne’s trust did not necessarily mean she had forfeited mine, of which one had a rather different conception. And that I trusted you goes without saying. Far less could I have dreamed you would attempt morally to justify yourself on the grounds that I was absorbed in a debauch: there are certain reasons too, to be revealed only at the day of reckoning, why you should not have stood in judgement upon me. Yet I am afraid—are you listening, Hugh?—that long before that day what you did impulsively and have tried to forget in the cruel abstraction of youth will begin to strike you in a new and darker light. I am sadly afraid that you may indeed, precisely because you are a good and simple person at bottom and genuinely respect more than most the principles and decencies that might have prevented it, fall heir, as you grow older and your conscience less robust, to a suffering on account of it more abominable than any you have caused me. How may I help you? How ward it off? How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him. Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and God has little patience with remorse! Yet does this help, what I am trying to tell you, that I realise to what degree I brought all this upon myself? Help, that I am admitting moreover that to have cast Yvonne upon you in that fashion was a feckless action, almost, I was going to say, a clownish one, inviting in return the inevitable bladder on the brain, the mouthful and heartful of sawdust. I sincerely hope so . . . Meantime, however, old fellow, my mind, staggering under the influence of the last half-hour’s strychnine, of the several therapeutic drinks before that, of the numerous distinctly untherapeutic drinks with Dr. Vigil before that, you must meet Dr. Vigil, I say nothing of his friend Jacques Laruelle to whom for various reasons I have hitherto avoided introducing you—please remind me to get back my Elizabethan plays from him—of the two days’ and one night’s continuous drinking before that, of the seven hundred and seventy-seven and a half—but why go on? My mind, I repeat, must somehow, drugged though it is, like Don Quixote avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there, take a clear cut around—did I say Dr. Vigil?—

“I say I say what’s the matter there?” The English “King’s Parade” voice, scarcely above him, called out from behind the steering wheel, the Consul saw now, of an extremely long low car drawn up beside him, murmurous: an M.G. Magna, or some such.

“Nothing.” The Consul sprang to his feet instantly sober as a judge. “Absolutely all right.”

“Can’t be all right, you were lying right down in the road there, what?” The English face, now turned up toward him, was rubicund, merry, kindly, but worried, above the English striped tie, mnemonic of a fountain in a great court.

The Consul brushed the dust from his clothes; he sought for wounds in vain; there was not a scratch. He saw the fountain distinctly. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought?

“All right, apparently,” he said, “thanks very much.”

“But damn it all I say you were lying right down in the road there, might have run over you, there must be something wrong, what? No?” The Englishman switched his engine off. “I say, haven’t I seen you before or something.”

“—”

“—”

“Trinity.” The Consul found his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more “English.” “Unless—”

“Caius.”

“But you’re wearing a Trinity tie—” the Consul remarked with a polite note of triumph.

“Trinity? . . . Yes. It’s my cousin’s, as a matter of fact.” The Englishman peered down his chin at the tie, his red merry face become a shade redder. “We’re going to Guatemala . . . Wonderful country this. Pity about all this oil business, isn’t it? Bad show.—Are you sure there’re no bones broken or anything, old man?”

“No. There are no bones broken,” the Consul said. But he was trembling.

The Englishman leaned forward fumbling as for the engine switch again. “Sure you’re all right? We’re staying at the Bella Vista Hotel, not leaving until this afternoon. I could take you along there for a little shuteye . . . Deuced nice pub I must say but deuced awful row going on all night. I suppose you were at the ball—is that it? Going the wrong way though, aren’t you? I always keep a bottle of something in the car for an emergency . . . No. Not Scotch. Irish. Burke’s Irish. Have a nip? But perhaps you’d—”

“Ah . . .” The Consul was taking a long draught. “Thanks a million.”

“Go ahead . . . Go ahead . . .”

“Thanks.” The Consul handed back the bottle. “A million.”

“Well, cheerio.” The Englishman restarted his engine. “Cheerio man. Don’t go lying down in roads. Bless my soul you’ll get run over or run in or something, damn it all. Dreadful road too. Splendid weather, isn’t it?” The Englishman drove away up the hill, waving his hand.

“If you’re ever in any kind of a jam yourself,” the Consul cried after him recklessly, “I’m—wait, here’s my card—”

“Bungho!”

—It was not Dr. Vigil’s card the Consul still held in his hand: but it was certainly not his own. Compliments of the Venezuelan Government. What was this? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate . . . Wherever could this have sprung from? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate an acknowledgement to the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. Caracas, Venezuela. Well, now, Caracas—well, why not?

Erect as Jim Taskerson, he thought, married now too, poor devil—restored, the Consul glided down the Calle Nicaragua.

Within the house there was the sound of bathwater running out: he made a lightning toilet. Intercepting Concepta (though not before he had added a tactful strychnine to her burden) with the breakfast tray, the Consul, innocently as a man who has committed a murder while dummy at bridge, entered Yvonne’s room. It was bright and tidy. A gaily colored Oaxaqueñan serape covered the low bed where Yvonne lay half asleep with her head resting on one hand.

“How!”

“How!”

A magazine she’d been reading dropped to the floor. The Consul, inclined slightly forward over the orange juice and ranchero eggs, advanced boldly through a diversity of powerless emotions.

“Are you comfortable there?”

“Fine, thanks.” Yvonne accepted the tray smiling. The magazine was the amateur astronomy one she subscribed to and from the cover the huge domes of an observatory, haloed in gold and standing out in black silhouette like roman helmets, regarded the Consul waggishly. “ The Mayas ,” he read aloud, “ were far advanced in observational astronomy. But they did not suspect a Copernican system. ” He threw the magazine back on the bed and sat easily in his chair, crossing his legs, the tips of his fingers meeting in a strange calm, his strychnine on the floor beside him. “Why should they? . . . What I like though are the ‘vague’ years of the old Mayans. And their ‘pseudo years,’ mustn’t overlook them! And their delicious names for the months. Pop. Uo. Zip. Zotz. Tzec. Xul. Yaxkin.”

“Mac,” Yvonne was laughing. “Isn’t there one called Mac?”

“There’s Yax and Zac. And Uayeb: I like that one most of all, the month that only lasts five days.”

“In receipt of yours dated Zip the first!—”

“But where does it all get you in the end?” The Consul sipped his strychnine that had yet to prove its adequacy as a chaser to the Burke’s Irish (now perhaps in the garage at the Bella Vista). “The knowledge, I mean. One of the first penances I ever imposed on myself was to learn the philosophical section of War and Peace by heart. That was of course before I could dodge about in the rigging of the Cabbala like a St. Jago’s monkey. But then the other day I suddenly realised that the only thing I remembered about the whole book was that Napoleon’s leg twitched—”

“Aren’t you going to eat anything yourself? You must be starved.”

“I partook.”

Yvonne who was herself breakfasting heartily asked:

“How’s the market?”

“Tom’s a bit fed up because they’ve confiscated some property of his in Tlaxcala, or Puebla, he thought he’d got away with. They haven’t my number yet, I’m not sure where I really do stand in that regard, now I’ve resigned the service—”

“So you—”

“By the by I must apologise for still being in these duds—dusty too—bad show, I might have put on a blazer at least for your benefit!” The Consul smiled inwardly at his accent, now become for undivulgeable reasons almost uncontrolledly “English.”

“So you really have resigned!”

“Oh absolutely! I’m thinking of becoming a Mexican subject, of going to live among the Indians, like William Blackstone. But for one’s habit of making money, don’t you know, all very mysterious to you, I suppose, outside looking in—” The Consul stared round mildly at the pictures on the wall, mostly water-colours by his mother depicting scenes in Kashmir: a small grey stone enclosure encompassing several birch trees and a taller poplar was Lalla Rookh’s tomb, a picture of wild torrential scenery, vaguely Scottish, the gorge, the ravine at Gugganvir; the Shalimar looked more like the Cam than ever: a distant view of Nanga Parbat from Sind valley could have been painted on the porch here, Nanga Parbat might well have passed for old Popo . . . “—outside looking in,” he repeated, “the result of so much worry, speculation, foresight, alimony, seigniorage—”

“But—” Yvonne had laid aside her breakfast tray and taken a cigarette from her own case beside the bed and lit it before the Consul could help her.

“One might have already done so!”

Yvonne lay back in bed smoking . . . In the end the Consul scarcely heard what she was saying—calmly, sensibly, courageously—for his awareness of an extraordinary thing that was happening in his mind. He saw in a flash, as if these were ships on the horizon, under a black lateral abstract sky, the occasion for desperate celebration (it didn’t matter he might be the only one to celebrate it) receding, while at the same time, coming closer, what could only be, what was—Good God!—his salvation . . .

“ Now? ” he found he had said gently. “But we can’t very well go away now can we, what with Hugh and you and me and one thing and another, don’t you think? It’s a little unfeasible, isn’t it?” (For his salvation might not have seemed so large with menace had not the Burke’s Irish whiskey chosen suddenly to tighten, if almost imperceptibly, a screw. It was the soaring of this moment, conceived of as continuous, that felt itself threatened.) “Isn’t it?” he repeated.

“I’m sure Hugh’d understand—”

“But that’s not quite the point!”

“Geoffrey, this house has become somehow evil—”

“—I mean it’s rather a dirty trick—”

Oh Jesus . . . The Consul slowly assumed an expression intended to be slightly bantering and at the same time assured, indicative of a final consular sanity. For this was it. Goethe’s church bell was looking him straight between the eyes; fortunately, he was prepared for it. “I remember a fellow I helped out in New York once,” he was saying with apparent irrelevance, “in some way, an out of work actor he was. ‘Why Mr. Firmin,’ he said, ‘it isn’t naturel here.’ That’s exactly how he pronounced it: naturel. ‘Man wasn’t intended for it,’ he complained. ‘All the streets are the same as this Tenth or Eleventh Street in Philadelphia too . . .’ ” The Consul could feel his English accent leaving him and that of a Bleecker Street mummer taking its place. “ ‘But in Newcastle, Delaware, now that’s another thing again! Old cobbled roads . . . And Charleston: old Southern stuff. . . But oh my God this city—the noise! the chaos! If I could only get out! If I only knew where you could get to!’ ” The Consul concluded with passion, with anguish, his voice quivering—though as it happened he had never met any such person, and the whole story had been told him by Tom, he shook violently with the emotion of the poor actor.

“What’s the use of escaping,” he drew the moral with complete seriousness, “from ourselves?”

Yvonne had sunk back in bed patiently. But now she stretched forward and stabbed out her cigarette in the tray of a tall grey tin-work ashstand shaped like an abstract representation of a swan. The swan’s neck had become slightly unravelled but it bowed gracefully, tremulously at her touch as she answered:

“All right, Geoffrey: suppose we forget it until you’re feeling better: we can cope with it in a day or two, when you’re sober.”

“But good lord!”

The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, as if, he were not sober now! Yet there was some elusive subtlety in the impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No, he was not, not at this very moment he wasn’t! But what had that to do with a minute before, or half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he would be sober? And even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached this stage again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he could, as she put it, “cope,” this precarious precious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober! What right had she, when he had sat suffering the tortures of the damned and the madhouse on her behalf for fully twenty-five minutes on end without having a decent drink, even to hint that he was anything but, to her eyes, sober? Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard’s life! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could judge what was anterior to her arrival? And she knew nothing whatever of what all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his aplomb, coolness, even bravery there—the Burke’s Irish whiskey! What a world. And the trouble was she had now spoiled the moment. Because the Consul now felt that he might have been capable, remembering Yvonne’s “perhaps I’ll have one after breakfast,” and all that implied, of saying, in a minute (but for her remark and yes, in spite of any salvation), “Yes, by all means you are right: let us go!” But who could agree with someone who was so certain you were going to be sober the day after to-morrow? It wasn’t as though either, upon the most superficial plane, it were not well-known that no one could tell when he was drunk. Just like the Taskersons: God bless them. He was not the person to be seen reeling about in the street. True he might lie down in the street, if need be, like a gentleman; but he would not reel. Ah, what a world it was, that trampled down the truth and drunkards alike! A world full of bloodthirsty people, no less! Bloodthirsty, did I hear you say bloodthirsty, Commander Firmin?

“But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink,” he said almost tragically, taking an abrupt swallow of strychnine. “Why, do you think I like swilling down this awful nux vómica or bella donna or whatever it is of Hugh’s?” The Consul got up with his empty glass and began to walk around the room. He was not so much aware of having done by default anything fatal (it wasn’t as if, for instance, he’d thrown his whole life away) as something merely foolish, and at the same time, as it were, sad. Yet there seemed a call for some amends. He either thought or said:

“Well, to-morrow perhaps I’ll drink beer only. There’s nothing like beer to straighten you out, and a little more strychnine, and then the next day just beer—I’m sure no one will object if I drink beer. This Mexican stuff is particularly full of vitamins, I gather . . . For I can see it really is going to be somewhat of an occasion, this reunion of us all, and then perhaps when my nerves are back to normal again, I’ll go off it completely. And then, who knows,” he brought up by the door, “I might get down to work again and finish my book!”

But the door was still a door and it was shut: and now ajar. Through it, on the porch he saw the whiskey bottle, slightly smaller and emptier of hope than the Burke’s Irish, standing forlornly. Yvonne had not opposed a snifter: he had been unjust to her. Yet was that any reason why he should be unjust also to the bottle? Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass. But he could wait: yes, sometimes he knew when to leave it alone. He wandered back to the bed thinking or saying:

“Yes: I can see the reviews now. Mr. Firmin’s sensational new data on Atlantis! The most extraordinary thing of its kind since Donnelly! Interrupted by his untimely death . . . Marvellous. And the chapters on the alchemists! Which beat the Bishop of Tasmania to a frazzle. Only that’s not quite the way they’ll put it. Pretty good, eh? I might even work in something about Coxcox and Noah. I’ve got a publisher interested too; in Chicago—interested but not concerned, if you understand me, for it’s really a mistake to imagine such a book could ever become popular. But it’s amazing when you come to think of it how the human spirit seems to blossom in the shadow of the abattoir! How—to say nothing of all the poetry—not far enough below the stockyards to escape altogether the reek of the porterhouse of to-morrow, people can be living in cellars the life of the old alchemists of Prague! Yes: living among the cohabations of Faust himself, among the litharge and agate and hyacinth and pearls. A life which is amorphous, plastic and crystalline. What am I talking about? Copula Maritalis? Or from alcohol to alkahest. Can you tell me? . . . Or perhaps I might get myself another job, first of course being sure to insert an advertisement in the Universal : will accompany corpse to any place in the east!”

Yvonne was sitting up half reading her magazine, her nightgown slightly pulled aside showing where her warm tan faded into the white skin of her breast, her arms outside the covers and one hand turned downward from the wrist hanging over the edge of the bed listlessly: as he approached she turned this hand palm upward in an involuntary movement, of irritation perhaps, but it was like an unconscious gesture of appeal: it was more: it seemed to epitomize, suddenly, all the old supplication, the whole queer secret dumb-show of incommunicable tendernesses and loyalties and eternal hopes of their marriage. The Consul felt his tearducts quicken. But he had also felt a sudden peculiar sense of embarrassment, a sense, almost, of indecency that he, a stranger, should be in her room. This room! He went to the door and looked out. The whiskey bottle was still there.

But he made no motion towards it, none at all, save to put on his dark glasses. He was conscious of new aches here and there, of, for the first time, the impact of the Calle Nicaragua. Vague images of grief and tragedy flickered in his mind. Somewhere a butterfly was flying out to sea: lost. La Fontaine’s duck had loved the white hen yet after escaping together from the dreadful farmyard through the forest to the lake it was the duck that swam: the hen, following, drowned. In November, 1895, in convict dress, from two o’clock in the afternoon till half past, handcuffed, recognized, Oscar Wilde stood on the center platform at Clapham Junction . . .

When the Consul returned to the bed and sat down on it Yvonne’s arms were under the covers while her face was turned to the wall. After a while he said with emotion, his voice grown hoarse again:

“Do you remember how the night before you left we actually made a date like a couple of strangers to meet for dinner in Mexico City?”

Yvonne gazed at the wall:

“You didn’t keep it.”

“That was because I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant at the last moment. All I knew was that it was in the Via Dolorosa somewhere. It was the one we’d discovered together the last time we were in the City. I went into all the restaurants in the Via Dolorosa looking for you and not finding you I had a drink in each one.”

“Poor Geoffrey.”

“I must have phoned back the Hotel Canada from each restaurant. From the cantina of each restaurant. God knows how many times, for I thought you might have returned there. And each time they said the same thing, that you’d left to meet me, but they didn’t know where. And finally they became pretty damned annoyed. I can’t imagine why we stayed at the Canada instead of the Regis:—do you remember how they kept mistaking me there, with my beard, for that wrestler? . . . Anyhow, there I was wandering around from place to place, wrestling, and thinking all the while I could prevent you from going the next morning, if I could only find you!”

“Yes.”

(If you could only find her! Ah, how cold it was that night, and bitter, with a howling wind and wild steam blowing from the pavement gratings where the ragged children were making to sleep early under their poor newspapers. Yet none was more homeless than you, as it grew later and colder and darker, and still you had not found her! And a sorrowful voice seemed to be wailing down the street at you with the wind calling its name: Via Dolorosa, Via Dolorosa! And then somehow it was early the next morning directly after she had left the Canada—you brought one of her suitcases down yourself though you didn’t see her off—and you were sitting in the hotel bar drinking mescal with ice in it that chilled your stomach, you kept swallowing the lemon pips, when suddenly a man with the look of an executioner came from the street dragging two little fawns shrieking with fright into the kitchen. And later you heard them screaming, being slaughtered probably. And you thought: better not remember what you thought. And later still, after Oaxaca, when you had returned here to Quauhnahuac, through the anguish of that return—circling down from the Tres Marías in the Plymouth, seeing the town below through the mist, and then the town itself, the landmarks, your soul dragged past them as at the tail of a runaway horse—when you returned here—)

“The cats had died,” he said, “when I got back—Pedro insisted it was typhoid. Or rather, poor old Oedipuss died the very day you left apparently, he’d already been thrown down the barranca, while little Pathos was lying in the garden under the plantains when I arrived looking even sicker than when we first picked her out of the gutter; dying, though no one could make out what of: Maria claimed it was a broken heart—”

“Cheery little matter,” Yvonne answered in a lost hard tone with her face still turned to the wall.

“Do you remember your song, I won’t sing it: ‘No work has been done by the little cat, no work has been done by the big cat, no work has been done, by an-y-one!’ ” the Consul heard himself ask; tears of sorrow came to his eyes, he removed his dark glasses quickly and buried his face on her shoulder. “No, but Hugh,” she began—“Never mind Hugh,” he had not meant to elicit this, to thrust her back against the pillows; he felt her body stiffen, becoming hard and cold. Yet her consent did not seem from weariness only, but to a solution for one shared instant beautiful as trumpets out of a clear sky . . .

But he could feel now, too, trying the prelude, the preparatory nostalgic phrases on his wife’s senses, the image of his possession, like that jewelled gate the desperate neophyte, Yesod-bound, projects for the thousandth time on the heavens to permit passage of his astral body, fading, and slowly, inexorably, that of a cantina, when in dead silence and peace it first opens in the morning, taking its place. It was one of those cantinas that would be opening now, at nine o’clock: and he was queerly conscious of his own presence there with the angry tragic words, the very words which might soon be spoken, glaring behind him. This image faded also: he was where he was, sweating now, glancing once—but never ceasing to play the prelude, the little one-fingered introduction to the unclassifiable composition that might still just follow—out of the window at the drive, fearful himself lest Hugh appear there, then he imagined he really saw him at the end of it coming through the gap, now that he distinctly heard his step in the gravel . . . No one. But now, now he wanted to go, passionately he wanted to go, aware that the peace of the cantina was changing to its first fevered preoccupation of the morning: the political exile in the corner discreetly sipping orange crush, the accountant arriving, accounts gloomily surveyed, the iceblock dragged in by a brigand with an iron scorpion, the one bartender slicing lemons, the other, sleep in his eyes, sorting beer bottles. And now, now he wanted to go, aware that the place was filling with people not at any other time part of the cantina’s community at all, people eructating, exploding, committing nuisances, lassoes over their shoulders, aware too of the debris from the night before, the dead matchboxes, lemon peel, cigarettes open like tortillas, the dead packages of them swarming in filth and sputum. Now that the clock over the mirror would say a little past nine, and the news-vendors of La Prensa and El Universal were stamping in, or standing in the corner at this very moment before the crowded grimed mingitorio with the shoe-blacks who carried their shoestools in their hands, or had left them balanced between the burning footrail and the bar, now he wanted to go! Ah none but he knew how beautiful it all was, the sunlight, sunlight, sunlight flooding the bar of El Puerto del Sol, flooding the watercress and oranges, or falling in a single golden line as if in the act of conceiving a God, falling like a lance straight into a block of ice—

“Sorry, it isn’t any good I’m afraid.” The Consul shut the door behind him and a small rain of plaster showered on his head. A Don Quixote fell from the wall. He picked up the sad straw knight . . .

And then the whiskey bottle: he drank fiercely from it.

He had not forgotten his glass however, and into it he was now pouring himself chaotically a long drink of his strychnine mixture, half by mistake, he’d meant to pour the whiskey. “Strychnine is an aphrodisiac. Perhaps it will take immediate effect. It still may not be too late.” He had sunk through, it almost felt, the green cane rocking chair.

He just managed to reach his glass left on the tray and held it now in his hands, weighing it, but—for he was trembling again, not slightly, but violently, like a man with Parkinson’s disease or palsy—unable to bring it to his lips. Then without drinking he set it on the parapet. After a while, his whole body quaking, he rose deliberately and poured, somehow, into the other unused tumbler Concepta had not removed, about a half quartern of whiskey. Nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante. Siguiendo. Born 1896 and still going flat. I love you, he murmured, gripping the bottle with both hands as he replaced it on the tray. He now brought the tumbler filled with whiskey back to his chair and sat with it in his hands, thinking. Presently without having drunk from this glass either he set it on the parapet next to his strychnine. He sat watching both the glasses. Behind him in the room he heard Yvonne crying.

—“Have you forgotten the letters Geoffrey Firmin the letters she wrote till her heart broke why do you sit there trembling why do you not go back to her now she will understand after all it hasn’t always been that way toward the end perhaps but you could laugh at this you could laugh at it why do you think she is weeping it is not for that alone you have done this to her my boy the letters you not only have never answered you didn’t you did you didn’t you did then where is your reply but have never really read where are they now they are lost Geoffrey Firmin lost or left somewhere even we do not know where—”

The Consul reached forward and absentmindedly managed a sip of whiskey; the voice might have been either of his familiars or—

Hullo, good morning.

The instant the Consul saw the thing he knew it an hallucination and he sat, quite calmly now, waiting for the object shaped like a dead man and which seemed to be lying flat on its back by his swimming pool, with a large sombrero over its face, to go away. So the “other” had come again. And now gone, he thought: but no, not quite, for there was still something there, in some way connected with it, or here, at his elbow, or behind his back, in front of him now; no, that too, whatever it was, was going: perhaps it had only been the coppery-tailed trogon stirring in the bushes, his “ambiguous bird” that was now departing quickly on creaking wings, like a pigeon once it was in flight, heading for its solitary home in the Canyon of the Wolves, away from the people with ideas.

“Damn it, I feel pretty well,” he thought suddenly, finishing his half quatern. He stretched out for the whiskey bottle, failed to reach it, rose again and poured himself another finger. “My hand is much steadier already.” He finished this whiskey and taking the glass and the bottle of Johnny Walker, which was fuller than he’d imagined, crossed the porch to its furthest corner and placed them in a cupboard. There were two old golf balls in the cupboard. “Play with me I can still carry the eighth green in three. I am tapering off,” he said. “What am I talking about? Even I know I am being fatuous.”

“I shall sober up.” He returned and poured some more strychnine into the other glass, filling it, then moved the strychnine bottle from the tray into a more prominent position on the parapet. “After all I have been out all night: what could one expect?”

“I am too sober. I have lost my familiars, my guardian angels. I am straightening out,” he added, sitting down again opposite the strychnine bottle with his glass. “In a sense what happened was a sign of my fidelity, my loyalty; any other man would have spent this last year in a very different manner. At least I have no disease,” he cried in his heart, the cry seeming to end on a somewhat doubtful note, however. “And perhaps it’s fortunate I’ve had some whiskey since alcohol is an aphrodisiac too. One must never forget either that alcohol is a food. How can a man be expected to perform his marital duties without food? Marital? At all events I am progressing, slowly but surely. Instead of immediately rushing out to the Bella Vista and getting drunk as I did the last time all this happened and we had that disastrous quarrel about Jacques and I smashed the electric light bulb, I have stayed here. True, I had the car before and it was easier. But here I am. I am not escaping. And what’s more I intend to have a hell of a sight better time staying.” The Consul sipped his strychnine, then put his glass on the floor.

“The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it.”

He lay back in his chair. Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, that image of the perfect marriage, lay now clear and beautiful on the horizon under an almost pure morning sky. Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!

Enormously high too, he noted some vultures waiting, more graceful than eagles as they hovered there like burnt papers floating from a fire which suddenly are seen to be blowing swiftly upward, rocking.

The shadow of an immense weariness stole over him . . . The Consul fell asleep with a crash.