— Nel mezzo del bloody cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai in . . . Hugh flung himself down on the porch daybed.

A strong warm gusty wind howled over the garden. Refreshed by his swim and a lunch of turkey sandwiches, the cigar Geoff had given him earlier partially shielded by the parapet, he lay watching the clouds speeding across the Mexican skies. How fast they went, how far too fast! In the middle of our life, in the middle of the bloody road of our life . . .

Twenty-nine clouds. At twenty-nine a man was in his thirtieth year. And he was twenty-nine. And now at last, though the feeling had perhaps been growing on him all morning, he knew what it felt like, the intolerable impact of this knowledge that might have come at twenty-two, but had not, that ought at least to have come at twenty-five, but still somehow had not, this knowledge, hitherto associated only with people tottering on the brink of the grave and A. E. Housman, that one could not be young forever—that indeed, in the twinkling of an eye, one was not young any longer. For in less than four years, passing so swiftly to-day’s cigarette seemed smoked yesterday, one would be thirty-three, in seven more, forty; in forty-seven, eighty. Sixty-seven years seemed a comfortingly long time but then he would be a hundred. I am not a prodigy any longer. I have no excuse any longer to behave in this irresponsible fashion. I am not such a dashing fellow after all. I am not young. On the other hand: I am a prodigy. I am young. I am a dashing fellow. Am I not? You are a liar, said the trees tossing in the garden. You are a traitor, rattled the plantain leaves. And a coward too, put in some fitful sounds of music that might have meant that in the zócalo the fair was beginning. And they are losing the Battle of the Ebro. Because of you, said the wind. A traitor even to your journalist friends you like to run down and who are really courageous men, admit it— Ahhh! Hugh, as if to rid himself of these thoughts, turned the radio dial back and forth, trying to get San Antonio (“I am none of these things really.” “I have done nothing to warrant all this guilt.” “I am no worse than anybody else . . .”); but it was no good. All his resolutions of this morning were to no avail. It seemed useless to struggle any further with these thoughts, better to let them have their way. At least they would take his mind from Yvonne for a time, if they only led back to her in the end. Even Juan Cerillo failed him now, as did, at this moment, San Antonio: two Mexican voices on different wave lengths were breaking in. For everything you have done up to now has been dishonest, the first might have been saying. What about the way you treated poor old Bolowski, the music publisher, remember his shabby little shop in old Compton Street, off the Tottenham Court Road? Even what you persuade yourself is the best thing about you, your passion for helping the Jews, has some basis in a dishonorable action of your own. Small wonder, since he so charitably forgave you, that you forgave him his skulduggery, to the point of being prepared to lead the whole Jewish race out of Babylon itself . . . No: I am much afraid there is little enough in your past, which will come to your aid against the future. Not even the seagull? said Hugh . . .

The seagull—pure scavenger of the empyrean, hunter of edible stars—I rescued that day as a boy when it was caught in a fence on the cliffside and was beating itself to death, blinded by snow, and though it attacked me, I drew it out unharmed, with one hand by its feet, and for one magnificent moment held it up in the sunlight, before it soared away on angelic wings over the freezing estuary?

The artillery started blasting away in the foothills again. A train hooted somewhere, like an approaching steamer; perhaps the very train Hugh’d be taking to-night. From the bottom of the swimming pool below a reflected small sun blazed and nodded among the inverted papayas. Reflections of vultures a mile deep wheeled upside down and were gone. A bird, quite close really, seemed to be moving in a series of jerks across the glittering summit of Popocatepetl—the wind, in fact, had dropped, which was as well for his cigar. The radio had gone dead too, and Hugh gave it up, settling himself back on the daybed.

Not even the seagull was the answer of course. The seagull had been spoilt already by his dramatising it. Nor yet the poor little hot-dog man? That bitter December night he had met him trudging down Oxford Street with his new wagon—the first hot-dog wagon in London, and he had been pushing it around for a whole month without selling a single hotdog. Now with a family to support and Christmas approaching he was on his uppers. Shades of Charles Dickens! It was perhaps the newness of the wretched wagon he’d been cozened into buying that seemed so awful. But how could he expect, Hugh asked him, as above them the monstrous deceptions twitched on and off, and around them the black soulless buildings stood wrapped in a cold dream of their own destruction (they had halted by a church from whose sooty wall a figure of Christ on the cross had been removed leaving only the scar and the legend: Is it nothing to you all ye who pass by?) how could he expect to sell anything so revolutionary as a hot dog in Oxford Street? He might as well try ice cream at the South Pole. No, the idea was to camp outside a pub down a back alley, and that not any pub, but the Fitzroy Tavern in Charlotte Street, chock full of starving artists drinking themselves to death simply because their souls pined away, each night between eight and ten, for lack of just such a thing as a hot dog. That was the place to go!

And—not even the hot-dog man was the answer; even though by Christmas time, obviously, he had been doing a roaring trade outside the Fitzroy. Hugh suddenly sat up, scattering cigar-ash everywhere.—And yet is it nothing I am beginning to atone, to atone for my past, so largely negative, selfish, absurd, and dishonest? That I propose to sit on top of a shipload of dynamite bound for the hard-pressed Loyalist armies? Nothing that after all I am willing to give my life for humanity, if not in minute particulars? Nothing to ye that pass by? . . . Though what on earth he expected it to be, if none of his friends knew he was going to do it, was not very clear. So far as the Consul was concerned, he probably suspected him of something even more reckless. And it had to be admitted, one was not altogether averse to this, if it had not prevented the Consul from still hinting uncomfortably close to the truth, that the whole stupid beauty of such a decision made by anyone at a time like this, must lie in that it was so futile, that it was too late, that the Loyalists had already lost, and that should that person emerge safe and sound, no one would be able to say of him that he had been carried away by the popular wave of enthusiasm for Spain, when even the Russians had given up, and the Internationals withdrawn. But death and truth could rhyme at a pinch! There was the old dodge too of telling anyone who shook the dust of the City of Destruction from his feet he was running away from himself and his responsibilities. But the useful thought struck Hugh: I have no responsibilities. And how can I be escaping from myself when I am without a place on earth? No home. A piece of driftwood on the Indian Ocean. Is India my home? Disguise myself as an untouchable, which should not be so difficult, and go to prison on the Andaman Islands for seventy-seven years, until England gives India her freedom? But I will tell you this: you would only by doing so be embarrassing Mahatma Ghandi, secretly the only public figure in the world for whom you have any respect. No, I respect Stalin too, Cárdenas, and Jawaharlal Nehru—all three of whom probably could only be embarrassed by my respect.—Hugh had another shot at San Antonio.

The radio came alive with a vengeance; at the Texan station news of a flood was being delivered with such rapidity one gained the impression the commentator himself was in danger of drowning. Another narrator in a higher voice gobbled bankruptcy, disaster, while yet another told of misery blanketing a threatened capital, people stumbling through debris littering dark streets, hurrying thousands seeking shelter in bomb-torn darkness. How well he knew the jargon. Darkness, disaster! How the world fed on it. In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard-of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement. A bawling scream abruptly warned of stocks lower, or irregularly higher, the prices of grain, cotton, metal, munitions. While static rattled on eternally below—poltergeists of the ether, claqueurs of the idiotic! Hugh inclined his ear to the pulse of this world beating in that latticed throat, whose voice was now pretending to be horrified at the very thing by which it proposed to be engulfed the first moment it could be perfectly certain the engulfing process would last long enough. Impatiently switching the dial around, Hugh thought he heard Joe Venuti’s violin suddenly, the joyous little lark of discursive melody soaring in some remote summer of its own above all this abyssal fury, yet furious too, with the wild controlled abandon of that music which still sometimes seemed to him the happiest thing about America. Probably they were rebroadcasting some ancient record, one of those with the poetical names like Little Buttercup or Apple Blossom, and it was curious how much it hurt, as though this music, never outgrown, belonged irretrievably to that which had to-day at last been lost. Hugh switched the radio off, and lay, cigar between his fingers, staring at the porch ceiling.

Joe Venuti had not been the same, one heard, since Ed Lang died. The latter suggested guitars, and if Hugh ever wrote, as he often threatened to do, his autobiography, though it would have been rather unnecessary, his life being one of those that perhaps lent themselves better to such brief summation in magazines as “So and so is twenty-nine, has been riveter, song-writer, watcher of manholes, stoker, sailor, riding instructor, variety artist, bandsman, bacon-scrubber, saint, clown, soldier (for five minutes), and usher in a spiritualist church, from which it should not always be assumed that far from having acquired through his experiences a wider view of existence, he has a somewhat narrower notion of it than any bank clerk who has never set foot outside Newcastle-under-Lyme,”—but if he ever wrote it, Hugh reflected, he would have to admit that a guitar made a pretty important symbol in his life.

He had not played one, and Hugh could play almost any kind of guitar, for four or five years, and his numerous instruments declined with his books in basements or attics in London or Paris, in Wardour Street night clubs or behind the bar of the Marquis of Granby or the old Astoria in Greek Street, long since become a convent and his bill still unpaid there, in pawnshops in Tithebarn Street or the Tottenham Court Road, where he imagined them as waiting for a time with all their sounds and echoes for his heavy step, and then, little by little, as they gathered dust, and each successive string broke, giving up hope, each string a hawser to the fading memory of their friend, snapping off, the highest pitched string always first, snapping with sharp gun-like reports, or curious agonized whines, or provocative nocturnal meows, like a nightmare in the soul of George Frederic Watts, till there was nothing but the blank untumultuous face of the songless lyre itself, soundless cave for spiders and steamflies, and delicate fretted neck, just as each breaking string had severed Hugh himself pang by pang from his youth, while the past remained, a tortured shape, dark and palpable and accusing. Or the guitars would have been stolen many times by now, or resold, repawned—inherited by some other master perhaps, as if each were some great thought or doctrine. These sentiments, he was almost diverted to think, were possibly more suited to some exiled dying Segovia than to a mere ex-hot-guitarist. But Hugh, if he could not play quite like Django Reinhardt or Eddie Lang on the one hand or, God help him, Frank Crumit on the other, could not help remembering either that he had once enjoyed the reputation of a tremendous talent. It was in an odd sense spurious, this reputation, like so much else about him, his greatest hits having been made with a tenor guitar tuned as a ukelele and played virtually as a percussion instrument. Yet that in this bizarre manner he had become the magician of commotions mistakable for anything from the Scotch Express to elephants trampling in moonlight, an old Parlophone rhythm classic (entitled, tersely, Juggernaut) testified to this day. At all events, he thought, his guitar had probably been the least fake thing about him. And fake or not one had certainly been behind most of the major decisions of his life. For it was due to a guitar he’d become a journalist, it was due to a guitar he had become a song-writer, it was largely owing to a guitar even—and Hugh felt himself suffused by a slow burning flush of shame—that he had first gone to sea.

Hugh had started writing songs at school and before he was seventeen, at about the same time he lost his innocence, also after several attempts, two numbers of his were accepted by the Jewish firm of Lazarus Bolowski and Sons in New Compton Street, London. His method was each whole holiday to make the rounds of the music publishers with his guitar—and in this respect his early life vaguely recalled that of another frustrated artist, Adolf Hitler—his manuscripts transcribed for piano alone in the guitar case, or another old Gladstone bag of Geoff’s. This success in the tin-pan alleys of England overwhelmed him; almost before his aunt knew what was afoot he was leaving school on the strength of it with her permission. At this school, where he sub-edited the magazine, he got on erratically; he told himself that he hated it for the snobbish ideals prevailing there. There was a certain amount of anti-Semitism; and Hugh whose heart was easily touched, had, though popular for his guitar, chosen Jews as his particular friends and favoured them in his columns. He was already entered at Cambridge for a year or so hence. He had not, however, the slightest intention of going there. The prospect of it, for some reason, he dreaded only less than being stuck meantime at some crammer’s. And to prevent this he must act swiftly. As he naïvely saw it, through his songs there was an excellent chance of rendering himself completely independent, which also meant independent in advance of the income that four years later he was to begin receiving from the Public Trustees, independent of everybody, and without the dubious benefit of a degree.

But his success was already beginning to wear off a little. For one thing a premium was required (his aunt had paid the premium) and the songs themselves were not to be published for several months. And it struck him, more than prophetically as it happened, that these songs alone, while both of the requisite thirty-two bars, of an equal banality, and even faintly touched with moronism—Hugh later became so ashamed of their titles that to this day he kept them locked in a secret drawer of his mind—might be insufficient to do the trick. Well, he had other songs, the titles to some of which, Susquehanna Mammy, Slumbering Wabash, Mississippi Sunset, Dismal Swamp, etc., were perhaps revelatory, and that of one at least, I’m Homesick for Being Homesick (for being homesick for home) Vocal Fox Trot, profound, if not positively Wordsworthian . . .

But all this seemed to belong in the future. Bolowski had hinted he might take them if . . . And Hugh did not wish to offend him by trying to sell them elsewhere. Not that there were many other publishers left to try! But perhaps, perhaps, if these two songs did make a great hit, sold enormously, made Bolowski’s fortune, perhaps if some great publicity—

Some great publicity! This was it, this was always it, something sensational was needed, it was the cry of the times, and when that day he had presented himself at the Marine Superintendent’s office in Garston—Garston because Hugh’s aunt moved from London north to Oswaldtwistle in the spring—to sign on board the S.S. Philoctetes he was at least certain something sensational had been found. Oh, Hugh saw, it was a grotesque and pathetic picture enough, that of the youth who imagined himself a cross between Bix Beiderbecke, whose first records had just appeared in England, the infant Mozart, and the childhood of Raleigh, signing on the dotted line in that office; and perhaps it was true too he had been reading too much Jack London even then, The Sea Wolf , and now in 1938 he had advanced to the virile Valley of the Moon (his favourite was The Jacket ), and perhaps after all he did genuinely love the sea, and that nauseous overrated expanse was his only love, the only woman of whom his future wife need be jealous, perhaps all these things were true of that youth, glimpsing probably, too, from afar, beyond the clause Seamen and Firemen mutually to assist each other, the promise of unlimited delight in the brothels of the Orient—an illusion, to say the least: but what unfortunately almost robbed it all of any vestige of the heroic was that in order to gain his ends without, so to say, “conscience or consideration,” Hugh had previously visited every newspaper office within a radius of thirty miles, and most of the big London dailies had branch offices in that part of the north, and informed them precisely of his intention to sail on the Philoctetes , counting on the prominence of his family, remotely “news” even in England since the mystery of his father’s disappearance, together with his tale of his songs’ acceptance—he announced boldly that all were to be published by Bolowski—to make the story, and hence supply the needed publicity, and upon the fear engendered by this that yet more publicity and possibly downright ridicule must result for the family should they prevent his sailing, now a public matter, to force their hand. There were other factors too; Hugh had forgotten them. Even at that the newspapers could scarcely have felt his story of much interest had he not faithfully lugged along his bloody little guitar to each newspaper office. Hugh shuddered at the thought. This probably made the reporters, most, in fact, fatherly and decent men who may have seen a private dream being realised, humour the lad so bent on making an ass of himself. Not that anything of the sort occurred to him at the time. Quite the contrary. Hugh was convinced he’d been amazingly clever, and the extraordinary letters of “congratulation” he received from shipless buccaneers everywhere, who found their lives under a sad curse of futility because they had not sailed with their elder brothers the seas of the last war, whose curious thoughts were merrily brewing the next one, and of whom Hugh himself was perhaps the archetype, served only to strengthen his opinion. He shuddered again, for he might not have gone after all, he might have been forcibly prevented by certain husky forgotten relatives, never before reckoned with, who’d come as if springing out of the ground to his aunt’s aid, had it not been, of all people, for Geoff, who wired back sportingly from Rabat to their father’s sister: Nonsense. Consider Hugh’s proposed trip best possible thing for him. Strongly urge you give him every freedom. —A potent point, one considered; since now his trip had been deprived neatly not only of its heroic aspect but of any possible flavour of rebellion as well. For in spite of the fact that he now was receiving every assistance from the very people he mysteriously imagined himself running away from, even after broadcasting his plans to the world, he still could not bear for one moment to think he was not “running away to sea.” And for this Hugh had never wholly forgiven the Consul.

Even so, on the very day, Friday the thirteenth of May, that Frankie Trumbauer three thousand miles away made his famous record of For No Reason at All in C, to Hugh now a poignant historical coincidence, and pursued by neo-American frivolities from the English press, which had begun to take up the story with relish, ranging all the way down from “Schoolboy composer turns seaman”, “Brother of prominent citizen here feels ocean call”, “Will always return Oswaldtwistle, parting words of prodigy”, “Saga of schoolboy crooner recalls old Kashmir mystery”, to once, obscurely “Oh, to be a Conrad”, and once, inaccurately, “Undergraduate song-writer signs on cargo vessel, takes ukelele”,—for he was not yet an undergraduate, as an old able seaman was shortly to remind him—to the last, and most terrifying, though under the circumstances bravely inspired “No silk cushions for Hugh, says Aunt”, Hugh himself, not knowing whether he voyaged east or west, nor even what the lowliest hand had at least heard vaguely rumored, that Philoctetes was a figure in Greek mythology—son of Poeas, friend of Heracles, and whose cross-bow proved almost as proud and unfortunate a possession as Hugh’s guitar—set sail for Cathay and the brothels of Palambang. Hugh writhed on the bed to think of all the humiliation his little publicity stunt had really brought down on his head, a humiliation in itself sufficient to send anyone into even more desperate retreat than to sea . . . Meantime it is scarcely an overstatement to say (Jesus, Cock, did you see the bloody paper? We’ve got a bastard duke on board or something of that) that he was on a false footing with his shipmates. Not that their attitude was at all what might have been expected! Many of them at first seemed kind to him, but it turned out their motives were not entirely altruistic. They suspected, rightly, that he had influence at the office. Some had sexual motives, of obscure origin. Many on the other hand seemed unbelievably spiteful and malignant, though in a petty way never before associated with the sea, and never since with the proletariat. They read his diary behind his back. They stole his money. They even stole his dungarees and made him buy them back again, on credit, since they had already virtually deprived themselves of his purchasing power. They hid chipping hammers in his bunk and in his sea-bag. Then, all at once, when he was cleaning out, say, the petty officer’s bathroom, some very young seaman might grow mysteriously obsequious and say something like: “Do you realise, mate, you’re working for us, when we should be working for you?” Hugh, who did not see then he had put his comrades in a false position too, heard this line of talk with disdain. His persecutions, such as they were, he took in good part. For one thing, they vaguely compensated for what was to him one of the most serious deficiencies in his new life.

This was, in a complicated sense, its “softness.” Not that it was not a nightmare. It was, but of a very special kind he was scarcely old enough to appreciate. Nor that his hands were not worked raw then hard as boards. Or that he did not nearly go crazy with heat and boredom working under winches in the tropics or putting red lead on the decks. Nor that it was not all rather worse than fagging at school, or might have seemed so, had he not carefully been sent to a modern school where there was no fagging. It was, he did, they were; he raised no mental objections. What he objected to were little, inconceivable things.

For instance, that the forecastle was not called the fo’c’sle but the “men’s quarters,” and was not forward where it should be, but aft, under the poop. Now everyone knows a forecastle should be forward, and be called the fo’c’sle. But this forecastle was not called the fo’c’sle because in point of fact it was not a fo’c’sle. The deckhead of the poop roofed what all too patently were “men’s quarters,” as they were styled, separate cabins just like on the Isle of Man boat, with two bunks in each running along an alleyway broken by the messroom. But Hugh was not grateful for these hard-won “better” conditions. To him a fo’c’sle—and where else should the crew of a ship live?—meant inescapably a single evil-smelling room forward with bunks around a table, under a swinging kerosene lamp, where men fought, whored, drank, and murdered. On board the Philoctetes men neither fought, whored, nor murdered. As for their drinking, Hugh’s aunt had said to him at the end, with a truly noble romantic acceptance: “You know, Hugh, I don’t expect you to drink only coffee going through the Black Sea.” She was right. Hugh did not go near the Black Sea. On board, nevertheless, he drank mostly coffee: sometimes tea; occasionally water; and, in the tropics, limejuice. Just like all the others. This tea, too, was the subject of another matter that bothered him. Every afternoon, on the stroke of six and eight bells respectively, it was at first Hugh’s duty, his mate being sick, to run in from the galley, first to the bosun’s mess and afterwards to the crew, what the bosun called, with unction, “afternoon tea.” With tabnabs. The tabnabs were delicate and delicious little cakes made by the second cook. Hugh ate them with scorn. Imagine the Sea Wolf sitting down to afternoon tea at four o’clock with tabnabs! And this was not the worst. An even more important item was the food itself. The food on board the Philoctetes , a common British cargo steamer, contrary to a tradition so strong Hugh had hardly dared contradict it till this moment even in his dreams, was excellent; compared with that of his public school, where he had lived under catering conditions no merchant seaman would tolerate for five minutes, it was a gourmet’s fantasy. There were never fewer than five courses for breakfast in the P.O.’s mess, to which at the outset he was more strictly committed; but it proved almost as satisfying in the “men’s quarters.” American dry hash, kippers, poached eggs and bacon, porridge, steaks, rolls, all at one meal, even on one plate; Hugh never remembered having seen so much food in his life. All the more surprising then was it for him to discover it his duty each day to heave vast quantities of this miraculous food over the side. This chow the crew hadn’t eaten went into the Indian Ocean, into any ocean, rather, as the saying is, than “let it go back to the office.” Hugh was not grateful for these hard-won better conditions either. Nor, mysteriously, seemed anyone else to be. For the wretchedness of the food was the great topic of conversation. “Never mind, chaps, soon we’ll be home where a fellow can have some tiddley chow he can eat, instead of all this bloody kind of stuff, bits of paint, I don’t know what it is at all.” And Hugh, a loyal soul at bottom, grumbled with the rest. He found his spiritual level with the stewards, however . . .

Yet he felt trapped. The more completely for the realisation that in no essential sense had he escaped from his past life. It was all here, though in another form: the same conflicts, faces, same people, he could imagine, as at school, the same spurious popularity with his guitar, the same kind of unpopularity because he made friends with the stewards, or worse, with the Chinese firemen. Even the ship looked like a fantastic mobile football field. Anti-Semitism, it is true, he had left behind, for Jews on the whole had more sense than to go to sea. But if he had expected to leave British snobbery astern with his public school he was sadly mistaken. In fact, the degree of snobbery prevailing on the Philoctetes was fantastic, of a kind Hugh had never imagined possible. The chief cook regarded the tireless second cook as a creature of completely inferior station. The bosun despised the carpenter and would not speak to him for three months, though they messed in the same small room, because he was a tradesman, while the carpenter despised the bosun since he, Chips, was the senior petty officer. The chief steward, who affected striped shirts off duty, was clearly contemptuous of the cheerful second, who, refusing to take his calling seriously, was content with a singlet and a sweat-rag. When the youngest apprentice went ashore for a swim with a towel round his neck he was solemnly rebuked by a quartermaster wearing a tie without a collar for being a disgrace to the ship. And the captain himself nearly turned black in the face each time he saw Hugh because, intending a compliment, Hugh had described the Philoctetes in an interview as a tramp. Tramp or no, the whole ship rolled and weltered in bourgeois prejudices and taboos the like of which Hugh had not known even existed. Or so it seemed to him. It is wrong, though, to say she rolled. Hugh, far from aspiring to be a Conrad, as the papers suggested, had not then read a word of him. But he was vaguely aware Conrad hinted somewhere that in certain seasons typhoons were to be expected along the China coast. This was such a season; here, eventually, was the China coast. Yet there seemed no typhoons. Or if there were the Philoctetes was careful to avoid them. From the time she emerged from the Bitter Lakes till she lay in the roads at Yokohama a dead monotonous calm prevailed. Hugh chipped rust through the bitter watches. Only they were not really bitter; nothing happened. And they were not watches; he was a day worker. Still, he had to pretend to himself, poor fellow, there was something romantic in what he had done. As was there not! He might easily have consoled himself by looking at a map. Unfortunately maps also too vividly suggested school. So that going through the Suez he was not conscious of sphinxes, Ismailia, nor Mt. Sinai; nor, through the Red Sea, of Hejaz, Asir, Yemen. Because Perim belonged to India while so remote from it, that island had always fascinated him. Yet they stood off the terrible place a whole forenoon without his grasping the fact. An Italian Somaliland stamp with wild herdsmen on it was once his most treasured possession. They passed Guardafui without his realising this any more than when as a child of three he’d sailed by in the opposite direction. Later he did not think of Cape Comorin, or Nicobar. Nor, in the Gulf of Siam, of Pnom-Penh. Maybe he did not know himself what he thought about; bells struck, the engine thrummed; videre ; videre ; and far above was perhaps another sea, where the soul ploughed its high invisible wake—

Certainly Sokotra only became a symbol to him much later, and that in Karachi homeward bound he might have passed within figurative hailing distance of his birthplace never occurred to him . . . Hongkong, Shanghai; but the opportunities to get ashore were few and far between, the little money there was they could never touch, and after having lain at Yokohama a full month without one shore leave Hugh’s cup of bitterness was full. Yet where permission had been granted instead of roaring in bars the men merely sat on board sewing and telling the dirty jokes Hugh had heard at the age of eleven. Or they engaged in loutish neuter compensations. Hugh had not escaped the Pharisaism of his English elders either. There was a good library on board, however, and under the tutelage of the lamptrimmer Hugh began the education with which an expensive public school had failed to provide him. He read the Forsyte Saga and Peer Gynt . It was largely owing to the lamptrimmer too, a kindly quasi-communist, who normally spent his watch below studying a pamphlet named the Red Hand, that Hugh gave up his notion of dodging Cambridge. “If I were you I’d go to the poxing place. Get what you bloody can out of the set-up.”

Meanwhile his reputation had followed him relentlessly down the China coast. Though the headlines of the Singapore Free Press might read “Murder of Brother-in-Law’s Concubine” it would be surprising if shortly one did not stumble upon some such passage as: “A curly-headed boy stood on the fo’c’sle head of the Philoctetes as she docked in Penang strumming his latest composition on the ukelele.” News which any day now would turn up in Japan. Nevertheless the guitar itself had come to the rescue. And now at least Hugh knew what he was thinking about. It was of England, and the homeward voyage! England, that he had so longed to get away from, now became the sole object of his yearning, the promised land to him; through the monotony of eternally riding at anchor, beyond the Yokohama sunsets like breaks from Singing the Blues, he dreamed of her as a lover of his mistress. He certainly didn’t think of any other mistresses he might have had at home. His one or two brief affairs, if serious at the time, had been forgotten long ago. A tender smile of Mrs. Bolowski’s flashed in dark New Compton Street, had haunted him longer. No: he thought of the double-decker buses in London, the advertisements for music halls up north, Birkenhead Hippodrome: twice nightly 6:30, 8:30. And of green tennis courts, the thud of tennis balls on crisp turf, and their swift passage across the net, the people in deck chairs drinking tea (despite the fact he was well able to emulate them on the Philoctetes ), the recently acquired taste for good English ale and old cheese . . .

But above all there were his songs, which would now be published. What did anything matter when back home at that very Birkenhead Hippodrome perhaps, they were being played and sung, twice nightly, to crowded houses? And what were those people humming to themselves by those tennis courts if not his tunes? Or if not humming them they were talking of him. For fame awaited him in England, not the false kind he had already brought on himself, not cheap notoriety, but real fame, fame he could now feel, having gone through hell, through “fire”—and Hugh persuaded himself such really was the case—he had earned as his right and reward.

But the time came when Hugh did go through fire. One day a poor sister ship of a different century, the Oedipus Tyrannus , whose namesake the lamptrimmer of the Philoctetes might have informed him was another Greek in trouble, lay in Yokohama roads, remote, yet too near, for that night the two great ships ceaselessly turning with the tide gradually swung so close together they almost collided, one moment this seemed about to happen, on the Philoctetes’ poop all was excitement, then as the vessels barely slid by one another the first mate shouted through a megaphone:

“Give Captain Telson Captain Sanderson’s compliments, and tell him he’s been given a foul berth!”

The Oedipus Tyrannus , which, unlike the Philoctetes , carried white firemen, had been away from home the incredible period of fourteen months. For this reason her ill-used skipper was by no means so anxious as Hugh’s to deny his ship was a tramp. Twice now the Rock of Gibraltar had loomed on his starboard bow only to presage not Thames, or Mersey, but the Western Ocean, the long trip to New York. And then Vera Cruz and Colon, Vancouver and the long voyage over the Pacific back to the Far East. And now, just as everyone was feeling certain this time at last they were to go home, he had been ordered to New York once more. Her crew, especially the firemen, were weary to death of this state of affairs. The next morning, as the two ships rode again at a gracious distance, a notice appeared in the Philoctetes’ after messroom calling for volunteers to replace three seamen and four firemen of the Oedipus Tyrannus . These men would thus be enabled to return to England with the Philoctetes , which had been at sea only three months, but within the week on leaving Yokohama would be homeward bound.

Now at sea more days are more dollars, however few. And at sea likewise three months is a terribly long while. But fourteen months (Hugh had not yet read Melville either) is an eternity. It was not likely that the Oedipus Tyrannus would face more than another six of vagrancy: then one never knew; it might be the idea gradually to transfer her more long-suffering hands to homegoing vessels when she contacted them and keep her wandering two more years. At the end of two days there were only two volunteers, a wireless watcher and an ordinary seaman.

Hugh looked at the Oedipus Tyrannus in her new berth, but swinging again rebelliously close, as to the tether of his mind, the old steamer appearing now on one quarter, now on another, one moment near the breakwater, the next running out to sea. She was, unlike the Philoctetes , everything in his eyes a ship should be. First she was not in rig a football boat, a mass of low goalposts and trankums. Her masts and derricks were of the lofty coffee-pot variety. These former were black, of iron. Her funnel too was tall, and needed paint. She was foul and rusty, red lead showed along her side. She had a marked list to port, and, who knows, one to starboard as well. The condition of her bridge suggested recent contact—could it be possible?—with a typhoon. If not, she possessed the air of one who would soon attract them. She was battered, ancient, and happy thought, perhaps even about to sink. And yet there was something youthful and beautiful about her, like an illusion that will never die, but always remains hull-down on the horizon. It was said she was capable of seven knots. And she was going to New York! On the other hand should he sign on her, what became of England? He was not so absurdly sanguine about his songs as to imagine his fame so bright there after two years . . . Besides, it would mean a terrible readjustment, starting all over again. Still, there could not be the same stigma attaching to him on board. His name would scarcely have reached Colon. Ah, his brother Geoff, too, knew these seas, these pastures of experience, what would he have done?

But he couldn’t do it. Galled as he was lying a month at Yokohama without shore leave it was still asking too much. It was as if at school, just as the end of term beautifully came in sight, he had been told there would be no summer holidays, he must go on working as usual through August and September. Save that no one was telling him anything. Some inner self, merely, was urging him to volunteer so that another sea-weary man, homesick longer than he, might take his place. Hugh signed on board the Oedipus Tyrannus .

When he returned to the Philoctetes a month later in Singapore he was a different man. He had dysentery. The Oedipus Tyrannus had not disappointed him. Her food was poor. No refrigeration, simply an icebox. And a chief steward (the dirty ’og) who sat all day in his cabin smoking cigarettes. The fo’c’sle was forward too. He left her against his will however, due to an agential confusion, and with nothing in his mind of Lord Jim, about to pick up pilgrims going to Mecca. New York had been shelved, his shipmates, if not all the pilgrims, would probably reach home after all. Alone with his pain off duty Hugh felt a sorry fellow. Yet every now and then he rose on his elbow: my God what a life! No conditions could be too good for the men tough enough to endure it. Not even the ancient Egyptians knew what slavery was. Though what did he know about it? Not much. The bunkers, loaded at Miki—a black coaling port calculated to fulfil any landsman’s conception of a sailor’s dreams, since every house in it was a brothel, every woman a prostitute, including even an old hag who did tattoos—were soon full: the coal was near the stokehold floor. He had seen only the bright side of a trimmer’s job, if it could be said to have one. But was it much better on deck? Not really. No pity there either. To the sailor life at sea was no senseless publicity stunt. It was dead serious. Hugh was horribly ashamed of ever having so exploited it. Years of crashing dullness, of exposure to every kind of obscure peril and disease, your destiny at the mercy of a company interested in your health only because it might have to pay your insurance, your home life reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen months, that was the sea. That, and a secret longing to be buried in it. And an enormous unquenchable pride. Hugh now thought he realised dimly what the lamptrimmer had tried to explain, why he had been alternately abused and toadied to on the Philoctetes . It was largely because he had foolishly advertised himself as the representative of a heartless system both distrusted and feared. Yet to seamen this system offers far greater inducement than to firemen, who rarely emerge through the hawse-hole into the bourgeois upper air. Nevertheless, it remains suspect. Its ways are devious. Its spies are everywhere. It will wheedle to you, who can tell, even on a guitar. For this reason its diary must be read. One must check up, keep abreast of its deviltries. One must, if necessary, flatter it, ape it, seem to collaborate with it. And it, in turn, flatters you. It yields a point here and there, in matters such as food, better living conditions, even, though it has first destroyed the peace of mind necessary to benefit by them, libraries. For in this manner it keeps a stranglehold on your soul. And because of this it sometimes happens you grow obsequious and find yourself saying: “Do you know, you are working for us, when we should be working for you?” That is right too. The system is working for you, as you will shortly discover, when the next war comes, bringing jobs for all. “But don’t imagine you can get away with these tricks forever,” you are repeating all the time in your heart; “Actually we have you in our grip. Without us in peace or war Christendom must collapse like a heap of ashes!” Hugh saw holes in the logic of this thought. Nevertheless, on board the Oedipus Tyrannus , almost without taint of that symbol, Hugh had been neither abused nor toadied to. He had been treated as a comrade. And generously helped, when unequal to his task. Only four weeks. Yet those weeks with the Oedipus Tyrannus had reconciled him to the Philoctetes . Thus he became bitterly concerned that so long as he stayed sick someone else must do his job. When he turned to again before he was well he still dreamed of England and fame. But he was mainly occupied with finishing his work in style. During these last hard weeks he played his guitar seldom. It seemed he was getting along splendidly. So splendidly that, before docking, his shipmates insisted on packing his bag for him. As it turned out, with stale bread.

They lay at Gravesend waiting for the tide. Around them in the misty dawn sheep were already bleating softly. The Thames, in the half-light, seemed not unlike the Yangtze-Kiang. Then, suddenly, someone knocked out his pipe on a garden wall . . .

Hugh hadn’t waited to discover whether the journalist who came aboard at Silvertown liked to play his songs in his spare time. He’d almost thrown him bodily off the ship.

Whatever prompted the ungenerous act did not prevent his somehow finding his way that night to New Compton Street and Bolowski’s shabby little shop. Closed now and dark: but Hugh could almost be certain those were his songs in the window. How strange it all was! Almost he fancied he heard familiar chords from above—Mrs. Bolowski practising them softly in an upper room. And later, seeking an hotel, that all around him people were humming them. That night too, in the Astoria, this humming persisted in his dreams; he rose at dawn to investigate once more the wonderful window. Neither of his songs was there. Hugh was only disappointed an instant. Probably his songs were so popular no copies could be spared for display. Nine o’clock brought him again to Bolowski’s. The little man was delighted to see him. Yes, indeed, both his songs had been published a considerable time. Bolowski would go and get them. Hugh waited breathlessly. Why was he away so long? After all, Bolowski was his publisher. It could not be, surely, he was having any difficulty finding them. At last Bolowski and an assistant returned with two enormous packages. “Here,” he said, “are your songs. What would you like us to do with them? Would you like to take them? Or would you like us to keep them a while longer?”

And there, indeed, were Hugh’s songs. They had been published, a thousand sheets of each, as Bolowski said: that was all. No effort had been made to distribute them. Nobody was humming them. No comedian was singing them at the Birkenhead Hippodrome. No one had ever heard a word more of the songs “the schoolboy undergraduate” had written. And so far as Bolowski was concerned it was a matter of complete indifference whether anyone heard a word more in the future. He had printed them, thus fulfilling his part of the contract. It had cost him perhaps a third of the premium. The rest was clear profit. If Bolowski published a thousand such songs a year by the unsuspecting half-wits willing to pay why go to the expense of pushing them? The premiums alone were his justification. And after all, Hugh had his songs. Hadn’t he known, Bolowski gently explained, there was no market for songs by English composers? That most of the songs published were American? Hugh in spite of himself felt flattered at being initiated into the mysteries of the song-writing business. “But all the publicity,” he stammered, “wasn’t all that good advertising for you?” And Bolowski gently shook his head. That story had gone dead before the songs were published. “Yet it would be easy to revive it?—” Hugh muttered, swallowing all his complicated good intentions as he remembered the reporter he’d kicked off the ship the day before: then, ashamed, he tried another tack . . . Maybe, after all, one might stand more chance in America as a song-writer? And he thought, remotely, of the Oedipus Tyrannus . But Bolowski quietly scoffed at one’s chances in America; there, where every waiter was a song-writer—

All this while, though, Hugh had been half-hopefully glancing over his songs. At least his name was on the covers. And on one was actually the photograph of a dance band. Featured with enormous success by Izzy Smigalkin and his orchestra! Taking several copies of each he returned to the Astoria. Izzy Smigalkin was playing at the Elephant and Castle and thither he bent his steps, why he could not have said, since Bolowski had already implied the truth, that even had Izzy Smigalkin been playing at the Kilburn Empire itself he was still not the fellow to prove interested in any songs for which band parts had not been issued, be he featuring them by obscure arrangement through Bolowski with never so much success. Hugh became aware of the world.

He passed his exam to Cambridge but scarcely left his old haunts. Eighteen months must elapse before he went up. The reporter he’d thrown off the Philoctetes had said to him, whatever his point: “You’re a fool. You could have every editor in town running after you.” Chastened, Hugh found through this same man a job on a newspaper pasting cuttings in a scrap-book. So it had come to this! However he soon acquired some sense of independence—though his board was paid by his aunt. And his rise was rapid. His notoriety had helped, albeit he wrote nothing so far of the sea. At bottom he desired honesty, art, and his story of a brothel burning in Wapping Old Stairs was said to embrace both. But at the back of his mind other fires were smouldering. No longer did he grub around from shady publisher to publisher with his guitar and his manuscripts in Geoff’s gladstone bag. Yet his life once more began to bear a certain resemblance to Adolf Hitler’s. He had not lost touch with Bolowski, and in his heart he imagined himself plotting revenge. A form of private anti-Semitism became part of his life. He sweated racial hatred in the night. If it still sometimes struck him that in the stokehold he had fallen down the spout of the capitalist system that feeling was now inseparable from his loathing of the Jews. It was somehow the fault of the poor old Jews, not merely Bolowski, but all Jews, that he’d found himself down the stokehold in the first place on a wild goose chase. It was even due to the Jews that such economic excrescences as the British Mercantile Marine existed. In his day dreams he became the instigator of enormous pogroms—all-inclusive, and hence, bloodless. And daily he moved nearer his design. True, between it and him, from time to time rose up the shadow of the Philoctetes’ lamptrimmer. Or flickered the shadows of the trimmers in the Oedipus Tyrannus . Were not Bolowski and his ilk the enemies of their own race and the Jews themselves the castout, exploited, and wandering of the earth, even as they, even, once, as he? But what was the brotherhood of man when your brothers put stale bread in your sea-bag? Still, where else to turn for some decent and clear values? Had his father or mother not died perhaps? His aunt? Geoff? But Geoff, like some ghostly other self was always in Rabat or Timbuctoo. Besides he’d deprived him once already of the dignity of being a rebel. Hugh smiled as he lay on the daybed . . . For there had been someone, he now saw, to whose memory at least he might have turned. It reminded him moreover that he’d been an ardent revolutionary for a while at the age of thirteen. And, odd to recall, was it not this same Headmaster of his former prep school, and Scoutmaster, Dr. Gotelby, fabulous stalking totem pole of Privilege, the Church, the English gentleman—God save the King and sheet anchor of parents, who’d been responsible for his heresy? Goat old boy! With admirable independence the fiery old fellow, who preached the virtues each Sunday in Chapel, had illustrated to his goggling history class how the Bolshevists, far from being the child murderers in the Daily Mail , followed a way of life only less splendid than that current throughout his own community of Pangbourne Garden City. But Hugh had forgotten his ancient mentor then. Just as he had long since forgotten to do his good turn every day. That a Christian smiles and whistles under all difficulties and that once a scout you were always a communist. Hugh only remembered to be prepared. So Hugh seduced Bolowski’s wife.

This was perhaps a matter of opinion . . . But unfortunately it hadn’t changed Bolowski’s decision to file suit for divorce, naming Hugh as co-respondent. Almost worse was to follow. Bolowski suddenly charged Hugh with attempting to deceive him in other respects, that the songs he’d published were nothing less than plagiarisms of two obscure American numbers. Hugh was staggered. Could this be? Had he been living in a world of illusion so absolute he’d looked forward passionately to the publication of someone else’s songs, paid for by himself, or rather by his aunt, that, involvedly, even his disillusionment on their account was false? It was not, it proved, quite so bad as that. Yet there was all too solid ground for the accusation so far as one song was concerned . . .

On the daybed Hugh wrestled with his cigar. God almighty. Good God all blistering mighty. He must have known all the time. He knew he had known. On the other hand, caring only for the rendering, it looked as if he could be persuaded by his guitar that almost any song was his. The fact that the American number was infallibly a plagiarism too didn’t help the slightest. Hugh was in anguish. At this point he was living in Blackheath and one day, the threat of exposure dogging every footstep, he walked fifteen miles to the city, through the slums of Lewisham Catford, New Cross, down the Old Kent Road, past, ah, the Elephant and Castle, into the heart of London. His poor songs pursued him in a minor key now, macabre. He wished he could be lost in these poverty-stricken hopeless districts romanticised by Longfellow. He wished the world would swallow him and his disgrace. For disgrace there would be. The publicity he had once evoked on his own behalf assured it. How was his aunt going to feel now? And Geoff? The few people who believed in him? Hugh conceived a last gigantic pogrom; in vain. It seemed, finally, almost a comfort that his mother and father were dead. As for the senior tutor of his college, it wasn’t likely he would care to welcome a freshman just dragged through the divorce courts; dread words. The prospect seemed horrible, life at an end, the only hope to sign on another ship immediately it was all over, or if possible, before it all began.

Then, suddenly, a miracle occurred, something fantastic, unimaginable, and for which to this day Hugh could find no logical explanation. All at once Bolowski dropped the whole thing. He forgave his wife. He sent for Hugh and, with the utmost dignity, forgave him. The divorce suit was withdrawn. So were the plagiarism charges. It was all a mistake, Bolowski said. At worst the songs had never been distributed, so what damage had been done? The sooner it was all forgotten the better. Hugh could not believe his ears: nor in memory believe them now, nor that, so soon after everything had seemed so completely lost, and one’s life irretrievably ruined, one should, as though nothing had happened, have calmly gone up to—

“Help.”

Geoffrey, his face half covered with lather, was standing in the doorway of his room, beckoning tremulously with a shaving brush and Hugh, throwing his ravaged cigar into the garden, rose and followed him in. He normally had to pass through this interesting room to reach his own (the door of which stood open opposite, revealing the mowing machine) and at the moment, Yvonne’s being occupied, to reach the bathroom. This was a delightful place, and extremely large for the size of the house; its windows, through which sunlight was pouring, looked down the drive toward the Calle Nicaragua. The room was pervaded by some sweet heavy scent of Yvonne’s, while the odours of the garden filtered in through Geoff’s open bedroom window.

“The shakes are awful, did you never have the shakes,” the Consul was saying, shivering all over: Hugh took the shaving brush from him and began to relather it on a tablet of fragrant asses’ milk soap lying in the basin. “Yes, you did, I remember. But not the rajah shakes.”

“No—no newspaperman ever had the shakes.” Hugh arranged a towel about the Consul’s neck. “You mean the wheels.”

“The wheels within wheels this is.”

“I deeply sympathise. Now then, we’re all set. Stand still.”

“How on earth can I stand still?”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down.”

But the Consul could not sit down either.

“Jesus, Hugh, I’m sorry. I can’t stop bouncing about. It’s like being in a tank—did I say tank? Christ, I need a drink. What have we here?” The Consul grasped, from the windowsill, an uncorked bottle of bay rum. “What’s this like, do you suppose, eh? For the scalp.” Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. “Not bad. Not at all bad,” he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. “If slightly underproof . . . Like pernod, a little. A charm against galloping cockroaches anyway. And the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions. Wait a minute, I’m going to be—”

Hugh let the taps run loudly. Next door he heard Yvonne moving about, getting ready to go to Tomalín. But he’d left the radio playing on the porch; probably she could hear no more than the usual bathroom babel.

“Tit for tat,” the Consul, still trembling, commented, when Hugh had assisted him back to his chair. “I did that for you once.”

“Sí, hombre.” Hugh, lathering the brush again on the asses’ milk soap, raised his eyebrows. “Quite so. Better now, old fellow?”

“When you were an infant,” the Consul’s teeth chattered. “On the P and O boat coming back from India . . . The old Cocanada .”

Hugh resettled the towel around his brother’s neck, then, as if absentmindedly obeying the other’s wordless instructions, went out, humming, through the bedroom back to the porch, where the radio was now stupidly playing Beethoven in the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whiskey bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul’s books disposed quite neatly—in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying—on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection: Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda—God knows, Peter Rabbit; “Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,” the Consul liked to say—Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured him a stiff drink into a toothmug.

“Wherever did you find that?—ah! . . . You’ve saved my life!”

“That’s nothing. I did the same for Carruthers once.” Hugh now set about shaving the Consul who had become much steadier almost immediately.

“Carruthers—the Old Crow? . . . Did what for Carruthers?”

“Held his head.”

“He wasn’t tight of course, though.”

“Not tight . . . Submerged. In a supervision too.” Hugh flourished the cut-throat razor. “Try and sit still like that; you’re doing fine. He had a great respect for you—he had an enormous number of stories about you, mostly variations on the same one . . . however . . . The one about your riding into college on a horse—”

“Oh no . . . I wouldn’t have ridden it in. Anything bigger than a sheep frightens me.”

“Anyway there the horse was, tied up in the buttery. A pretty ferocious horse too. Apparently it took about thirty-seven gyps and the college porter to get it out.”

“Good lord . . . But I can’t imagine Carruthers ever getting so tight he’d pass out at a supervision. Let me see, he was only praelector in my time. I believe he was really more interested in his first editions than in us. Of course it was at the beginning of the war, a rather trying period . . . But he was a wonderful old chap.”

“He was still praelector in mine.”

(In my time? . . . But what, exactly, does that mean? What, if anything, did one do at Cambridge, that would show the soul worthy of Siegebert of East Anglia—Or, John Cornford! Did one dodge lectures, cut halls, fail to row for the college, fool one’s supervisor, finally, oneself? Read economics, then history, Italian, barely passing one’s exams? Climb the gateway against which one had an unseaman-like aversion, to visit Bill Plantagenet in Sherlock Court, and, clutching the wheel of St. Catherine, feel, for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern? Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one’s stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me. While oneself lived in a disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots, kept by a cripple, in a hovel near the station yard. Cambridge was the sea reversed; at the same time a horrible regression; in the strictest sense—despite one’s avowed popularity, the godsent opportunity—the most appalling of nightmares, as if a grown man should suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr. Bultitude in Vice Versa, to be confronted, not by the hazards of business, but by the geometry lesson he had failed to prepare thirty years before, and the torments of puberty. Digs and forecastles are where they are in the heart. Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, into its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, on gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, snobberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged—giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war. It was as though that experience of the sea, also, exaggerated by time, had invested one with the profound inner maladjustment of the sailor who can never be happy on land. One had begun, however, to play the guitar more seriously. And once again one’s best friends were often Jews, often the same Jews who had been at school with one. It must be admitted they were there first, having been there off and on since a.d. 1106. But now they seemed almost the only people old as oneself: only they had any generous, independent sense of beauty. Only a Jew did not deface the monk’s dream. And somehow only a Jew, with his rich endowment of premature suffering, could understand one’s own suffering, one’s isolation, essentially, one’s poor music. So that in my time and with my aunt’s aid I bought a University weekly. Avoiding college functions, I became a staunch supporter of Zionism. As a leader of a band composed largely of Jews, playing at local dances, and of my own private outfit Three Able Seamen, I amassed a considerable sum. The beautiful Jewish wife of a visiting American lecturer became my mistress. I had seduced her too with my guitar. Like Philoctetes’ bow or Oedipus’ daughter it was my guide and prop. I played it without bashfulness wherever I went. Nor did it strike me as any less than an unexpected and useful compliment that Phillipson, the artist, should have troubled to represent me, in a rival paper, as an immense guitar, inside which an oddly familiar infant was hiding, curled up, as in a womb—)

“Of course he was always a great connoisseur of wines.”

“He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day.” Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother’s beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery. “Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers? . . . You know, some of the genuine old 1611.”

“God how funny . . . Or isn’t it? The poor Old Crow.”

“He was a marvellous fellow.”

“The best.”

(. . . I have played the guitar before the Prince of Wales, begged in the streets with one for ex-service men on Armistice Day, performed at a reception given by the Amundsen society, and to a caucus of the French Chamber of Deputies as they arranged the approaching years. The Three Able Seamen achieved meteoric fame, Metronome compared us to Venuti’s Blue Four. Once the worst possible thing that could befall me seemed some hand injury. Nevertheless one dreamed frequently of dying, bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar, strumming to the end . . . Yet I stopped of my own accord. Suddenly, less than a year after going down from Cambridge, stopped, first in bands, then playing it intimately, stopped so completely that Yvonne, despite the tenuous bond of being born in Hawaii, doubtless doesn’t know I ever played, so emphatically no one says any longer: Hugh, where’s your guitar? Come on and give us a tune—)

“I have,” the Consul said, “a slight confession to make, Hugh . . . I cheated a little on the strychnine while you were away.”

“Thalavethiparothiam, is it?” Hugh observed, pleasantly menacing. “Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don’t be careful, as the Mexicans say, I’m going to shave the back of your neck.”

But first Hugh wiped the razor with some tissue paper, glancing absently through the door into the Consul’s room. The bedroom windows were wide open; the curtains blew inward very gently. The wind had almost dropped. The scents of the garden were heavy about them. Hugh heard the wind starting to blow again on the other side of the house, the fierce breath of the Atlantic, flavored with wild Beethoven. But here, on the leeward side, those trees one could see through the bathroom window seemed unaware of it. And the curtains were engaged with their own gentle breeze. Like the crew’s washing on board a tramp steamer, strung over number six hatch between sleek derricks lying in grooves, that barely dances in the afternoon sunlight, while abaft the beam not a league away some pitching native craft with violently flapping sails seems wrestling a hurricane, they swayed imperceptibly, as to another control . . .

(Why did I stop playing the guitar? Certainly not because, belatedly, one had come to see the point of Phillipson’s picture, the cruel truth it contained . . . They are losing the Battle of the Ebro—And yet, one might well have seen one’s continuing to play but another form of publicity stunt, a means of keeping oneself in the limelight, as if those weekly articles for the News of the World were not limelight enough! Or myself with the thing destined to be some kind of incurable “love-object,” or eternal troubadour, jongleur, interested only in married women—why?—incapable finally of love altogether . . . Bloody little man. Who, anyhow, no longer wrote songs. While the guitar as an end in itself at last seemed simply futile; no longer even fun—certainly a childish thing to be put away—)

“Is that right?”

“Is what right?”

“Do you see that poor exiled maple tree outside there,” asked the Consul, “propped up with those crutches of cedar?”

“No—luckily for you—”

“One of these days, when the wind blows from the other direction, it’s going to collapse.” The Consul spoke haltingly while Hugh shaved his neck. “And do you see that sunflower looking in through the bedroom window? It stares into my room all day.”

“It strolled into your room, do you say?”

“Stares. Fiercely. All day. Like God!”

(The last time I played it . . . Strumming in the King of Bohemia, London. Benskin’s Fine Ales and Stouts. And waking, after passing out, to find John and the rest singing unaccompanied that song about the balgine run. What, anyhow, is a balgine run? Revolutionary songs; bogus bolshy;—but why had one never heard such songs before? Or, for that matter, in England, seen such rich spontaneous enjoyment in singing? Perhaps because at any given gathering, one had always been singing oneself. Sordid songs: I Ain’t Got Nobody . Loveless songs: The One That I Love Loves Me . . . Though John “and the rest” were not, to one’s own experience at least, bogus: no more than who, at sunset walking with the crowd, or receiving bad news, witnessing injustice, once turned and thought, did not believe, turned back and questioned, decided to act . . . They are winning the Battle of the Ebro! Not for me, perhaps. Yet no wonder indeed if these friends, some of whom now lie dead on Spanish soil, had, as I then understood, really been bored by my pseudo-American twanging, not even good twanging finally, and had only been listening out of politeness—twanging—)

“Have another drink.” Hugh replenished the toothmug, handed it to the Consul, and picked up for him a copy of El Universal lying on the floor. “I think a little more down the side with that beard, and at the base of the neck.” Hugh stropped the razor thoughtfully.

“A communal drink.” The Consul passed the toothmug over his shoulder. “ ‘Clank of coins irritates at Forth Worth.’ ” Holding the paper quite steadily the Consul read aloud from the English page: “ ‘Kink unhappy in exile.’ I don’t believe it myself. ‘Town counts dog’s noses.’ I don’t believe that either, do you Hugh? . . .

“And—ah—yes!” he went on, “ ‘Eggs have been in a tree at Klamanth Falls for a hundred years, lumberjacks estimate by rings on wood.’ Is that the kind of stuff you write nowadays?”

“Almost exactly. Or: Japanese astride all roads from Shanghai. Americans evacuate . . . That kind of thing.—Sit still.”

(One had not, however, played it from that day to this . . . No, nor been happy from that day to this either . . . A little self-knowledge is a dangerous thing. And anyway, without the guitar, was one any less in the limelight, any less interested in married women—so on, and so forth? One immediate result of giving it up was undoubtedly that second trip to sea, that series of articles, the first for the Globe , on the British Coasting Trade. Then yet another trip—coming to naught spiritually. I ended a passenger. But the articles were a success. Saltcaked smokestacks. Britannia rules the waves. In future my work was looked for with interest . . . On the other hand why have I always lacked real ambition as a newspaperman? Apparently I have never overcome that antipathy to journalists, the result of my early ardent courtship of them. Besides it cannot be said I shared with my colleagues the necessity of earning a living. There was always the income. As a roving hand I functioned fairly well, still, up to this day, have done so—yet becoming increasingly conscious of loneliness, isolation—aware too of an odd habit of thrusting myself to the fore, then subsiding—as if one remembered one hadn’t the guitar after all . . . Maybe I bored people with my guitar. But in a sense—who cares?—it strung me to life—)

“Somebody quoted you in the Universal ,” the Consul was laughing, “some time ago. I just forget about what, I’m afraid . . . Hugh, how would you like, ‘at a most modest sacrifice,’ an ‘imported pair embroidered street extra large nearly new fur coat’?”

“Sit still.”

“Or a Cadillac for 500 pesos. Original price 200 . . . And what would this mean, do you suppose? ‘And a white horse also.’ Apply at box seven . . . Strange . . . Anti-alcoholic fish. Don’t like the sound of that. But here’s something for you. ‘A centricle apartment suitable for love nest.’ Or alternately, a ‘serious, discrete —’ ”

“—ha—”

“—apartment . . . Hugh, listen to this. ‘For a young European lady who must be pretty, acquaintanceship with a cultured man, not old, with good positions —’ ”

The Consul was shaking with laughter only, it appeared, and Hugh, laughing too, paused, razor aloft.

“But the remains of Juan Ramírez, the famous singer, Hugh, are still wandering in a melancholy fashion from place to place . . . Hullo, it says here that ‘grave objections’ have been made to the immodest behavior of certain police chiefs in Quauhnahuac. ‘Grave objections to—’ what’s this?—‘performing their private functions in public’—”

(“Climbed the Parson’s Nose,” one had written, in the visitors’ book at the little Welsh rock-climbing hotel, “in twenty minutes. Found the rocks very easy.” “Came down the Parson’s Nose,” some immortal wag had added a day later, “in twenty seconds. Found the rocks very hard.” . . . So now, as I approach the second half of my life, unheralded, unsung, and without a guitar, I am going back to sea again: perhaps these days of waiting are more like that droll descent, to be survived in order to repeat the climb. At the top of the Parson’s Nose you could walk home to tea over the hills if you wished, just as the actor in the Passion Play can get off his cross and go home to his hotel for a Pilsener. Yet in life ascending or descending you were perpetually involved with the mists, the cold and the overhangs, the treacherous rope and the slippery belay; only, while the rope slipped there was sometimes time to laugh. Nonetheless, I am afraid . . . As I am also of a simple gate, and climbing windy masts in port . . . Will it be as bad as the first voyage, the harsh reality of which for some reason suggests Yvonne’s farm? One wonders how she will feel the first time she sees someone stick a pig . . . Afraid; and yet not afraid; I know what the sea is like; can it be that I am returning to it with my dreams intact, nay, with dreams that, being without viciousness, are more child-like than before. I love the sea, the pure Norwegian sea. My disillusionment once more is a pose. What am I trying to prove by all this? Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hypocrite, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors. Tufthunter and pioneer in disguise. Iconoclast and explorer. Undaunted bore undone by trivialities! Why, one asks, instead of feeling stricken in that pub, didn’t I set about learning some of those songs, those precious revolutionary songs. What is to prevent one’s learning more of such songs now, new songs, different songs, anyhow, if only to recapture some early joy in merely singing, and playing the guitar? What have I got out of my life? Contacts with famous men . . . The occasion Einstein asked me the time, for instance. That summer evening, strolling toward the tumultuous kitchen of St. John’s—who is it that behind me has emerged from the rooms of the Professor living in D4? And who is it also strolling toward the Porter’s lodge—where, our orbits crossing, asks me the time? Is this Einstein, up for an honours degree? And who smiles when I say I don’t know . . . And yet asked me. Yes: the great Jew, who has upset the whole world’s notions of time and space, once leaned down over the side of his hammock strung between Aries and the Circlet of the Western Fish, to ask me, befuddled ex-anti-Semite, and ragged freshman huddled in his gown at the first approach of the evening star, the time. And smiled again when I pointed out the clock neither of us had noticed—)

“—better than having them perform their public functions in private anyhow, I should have thought,” Hugh said.

“You might have hit on something there. That is, those birds referred to are not police in the strict sense. As a matter of fact the regular police here—”

“I know, they’re on strike.”

“So of course they must be democratic from your point of view . . . Just like the army. All right, it’s a democratic army . . . But meantime these other cads are throwing their weight about a bit. It’s a pity you’re leaving. It might have been a story right down your alley. Did you ever hear of the Union Militar?”

“You mean the pre-war thingmetight, in Spain?”

“I mean here in this state. It’s affiliated to the Military Police, by which they’re covered, so to speak, because the Inspector General, who is the Military Police, is a member. So is the Jefe de Jardineros, I believe.”

“I heard they were putting up a new statue to Díaz in Oaxaca.”

—“Just the same,” pursued the Consul, in a slightly lowered tone, as their conversation continued in the next room, “there is this Union Militar, sinarquistas, whatever they’re called, if you’re interested, I’m not personally—and their headquarters used to be in the policía de Seguridad here, though it isn’t any longer, but in Parián somewhere, I heard.”

Finally the Consul was ready. The only further help he had required was with his socks. Wearing a freshly pressed shirt and a pair of tweed trousers with the jacket to them Hugh had borrowed and now brought in from the porch, he stood gazing at himself in the mirror.

It was most surprising, not only did the Consul now appear fresh and lively but to be dispossessed of any air of dissipation whatsoever. True, he had not before the haggard look of a depraved worn-out old man: why should he indeed, when he was only twelve years older than Hugh himself? Yet it was as though fate had fixed his age at some unidentifiable moment in the past, when his persistent objective self, perhaps weary of standing askance and watching his downfall, had at last withdrawn from him altogether, like a ship secretly leaving harbour at night. Sinister stories as well as funny and heroic had been told about his brother, whose own early poetic instincts clearly helped the legend. It occurred to Hugh that the poor old chap might be, finally, helpless, in the grip of something against which all his remarkable defences could avail him little. What use were his talons and fangs to the dying tiger? In the clutches, say, to make matters worse, of a boa-constrictor? But apparently this improbable tiger had no intention of dying just yet. On the contrary, he intended taking a little walk, taking the boa-constrictor with him, even to pretend, for a while, it wasn’t there. Indeed, on the face of it, this man of abnormal strength and constitution and obscure ambition, whom Hugh would never know, could never deliver nor make agreement to God for, but in his way loved and desired to help, had triumphantly succeeded in pulling himself together. While what had given rise to all these reflections was doubtless only the photograph on the wall both were now studying, whose presence there at all must surely discount most of those old stories, of a small camouflaged freighter, at which the Consul suddenly gestured with replenished toothmug:

“Everything about the Samaritan was a ruse. See those windlasses and bulkheads. That black entrance that looks as though it might be the entrance to the forecastle, that’s a shift too—there’s an anti-aircraft gun stowed away snugly in there. Over there, that’s the way you go down. Those were my quarters . . . There’s your quartermaster’s alley. That galley—it could become a battery, before you could say Coclogenus paca Mexico . . .

“Curiously enough though,” the Consul peered closer, “I cut that picture out of a German magazine,” and Hugh too was scrutinising the Gothic writing beneath the photograph: Der englische Dampfer trägt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-Boote . “Only on the next page, I recall, was a picture of the Emden,” the Consul went on, “with ‘So verliess ich den Weltteil unserer Antipoden,’ something of that nature, under it. ‘Our Antipodes.’ ” He gave Hugh a sharp glance that might have meant anything. “Queer people. But I see you’re interested in my old books all of a sudden . . . Too bad . . . I left my Boehme in Paris.”

“I was just looking.”

At, for God’s sake, A Treatise of Sulphur, written by Michall Sandivogius i.e. anagramatically Divi Leschi Genus Amo : at The Hermetical Triumph or the Victorious Philosophical Stone, a Treatise more compleat and more intelligible than any has been yet, concerning the Hermetical Magistery ; at The Secrets Revealed or an Open Entrance to the Sub-Palace of the King, containing the greatest Treasure in Chymistry never yet so plainly discovered, composed by a most famous Englishman styling himself Anonymus or Eyraeneus Philaletha Cosmopolita who by inspiration and reading attained to the Philosopher’s Stone at his age of twenty-three years Anno Domini 1645 : at The Musaeum Hermeticum, Reformatum et Amplificatum, Omnes Sopho-Spagyricae artis Discipulos fidelissime erudiens, quo pacto Summa illa vera que Lapidis Philosophici Medicina, qua res omnes qualemcunque defectum patientes, instaurantur, inveniri & haberi queat, Continens Tractatus Chimicos xxi Francofurti, Apud Hermannum à Sande CIƆ IƆC LXXVIII : at Sub-Mundanes, or the Elementaries of the Cabbala, reprinted from the text of the Abbé de Villars, Physio-Astro-Mystic, with an Illustrative Appendix from the work Demoniality, wherein is asserted that there are in existence on earth rational creatures besides men . . .

“Are there?” Hugh said, holding in his hand this last extraordinary old book—from which emanated a venerable and remote smell—and reflecting: “Jewish knowledge!” while a sudden absurd vision of Mr. Bolowski in another life, in a caftan, with a long white beard, and skull cap, and passionate intent look, standing at a stall in a sort of mediaeval New Compton Street, reading a sheet of music in which the notes were Hebrew Letters, was conjured to his mind.

“Erekia, the one who tears asunder; and they who shriek with a long drawn cry, Illirikim; Apelki, the misleaders or turners aside; and those who attack their prey by tremulous motion, Dresop; ah, and the distressful painbringing ones, Arekesoli; and one must not forget, either, Burasin, the destroyers by stifling smoky breath; nor Glesi, the one who glistens horribly like an insect; nor Effrigis, the one who quivers in a horrible manner, you’d like Effrigis . . . nor yet the Mames, those who move by backward motion, nor the movers with a particular creeping motion, Ramisen . . .” the Consul was saying. “The flesh inclothed and the evil questioners. Perhaps you would not call them precisely rational. But all these at one time or another have visited my bed.”

They had all of them in a tremendous hurry and the friendliest of humours set off for Tomalín. Hugh, himself somewhat aware of his drinks, was listening in a dream to the Consul’s voice rambling on—Hitler, he pursued, as they stepped out into the Calle Nicaragua—which might have been a story right down his alley, if only he’d shown any interest before—merely wished to annihilate the Jews in order to obtain just such arcana as could be found behind them in his bookshelves—when suddenly in the house the telephone rang.

“No, let it ring,” the Consul said as Hugh started back. It went on ringing (for Concepta had gone out) the tintinnabulation beating around the empty rooms like a trapped bird; then it stopped.

As they moved on Yvonne said:

“Why no, Geoff, don’t keep bothering about me, I feel quite rested. But if Tomalín’s too far for either of you, why don’t we go to the zoo?” She looked at them both darkly and directly and beautifully with her candid eyes under the broad brow, eyes with which she did not quite return Hugh’s smile, though her mouth suggested one. Perhaps she seriously interpreted Geoff’s flow of conversation as a good sign. And perhaps it was! Qualifying it with loyal interest, or at a quick preoccupied tangent with observations upon impersonal change or decay, serapes or carbon or ice, the weather—where was the wind now? they might have a nice calm day after all without too much dust—Yvonne, apparently revived by her swim and taking in everything about her afresh with an objective eye, walked with swiftness and grace and independence, and as though really not tired; yet it struck Hugh she walked by herself. Poor darling Yvonne! Greeting her when she was ready had been like meeting her once again after long absence, but it was also like parting. For Hugh’s usefulness was exhausted, their “plot” subtly lamed by small circumstances, of which not the least was his own continued presence. It would seem impossible now as their old passion to seek without imposture to be alone with her, even with Geoff’s interest at heart. Hugh cast a longing glance down the hill, the way they’d gone this morning. Now they were hastening in the opposite direction. This morning might have been already far in the past, like childhood or the days before the last war; the future was beginning to unwind, the euchred stupid bloody terrific guitar-playing future. Unsuitably girded against it, Hugh felt, noted with a reporter’s measure, Yvonne, bare-legged, was wearing instead of her yellow slacks a white tailored sharkskin suit with one button at the waist, and beneath it a brilliant high-necked blouse, like a detail in a Rousseau; the heels of her red shoes clicking laconically on the broken stones appeared neither flat nor high, and she carried a bright red bag. Passing her one would not have suspected agony. One would not have noticed lack of faith, nor questioned that she knew where she was going, nor wondered if she were walking in her sleep. How happy and pretty she looks, one would say. Probably she is going to meet her lover in the Bella Vista!—Women of medium height, slenderly built, mostly divorced, passionate but envious of the male—angel to him as he is bright or dark, yet unconscious destructive succubus of his ambitions—American women, with that rather graceful swift way of walking, with the clean scrubbed tanned faces of children, the skin finely textured with a satin sheen, their hair clean and shining as though just washed, and looking like that, but carelessly done, the slim brown hands that do not rock the cradle, the slender feet—how many centuries of oppression have produced them? They do not care who is losing the Battle of the Ebro, for it is too soon for them to outsnort Job’s warhorse. They see no significance in it, only fools going to death for a—

“One always heard they had a therapeutic quality. They always had zoos in Mexico apparently—Moctezuma, courteous fellow, even showed stout Cortez around a zoo. The poor chap thought he was in the infernal regions.” The Consul had discovered a scorpion on the wall.

“Alacrán?” Yvonne produced.

“It looks like a violin.”

“A curious bird is the scorpion. He cares not for priest nor for poor peon . . . It’s really a beautiful creature. Leave him be. He’ll only sting himself to death anyway.” The Consul swung his stick . . .

They climbed the Calle Nicaragua, always between the parallel swift streams, past the school with the grey tombstones and the swing like a gallows, past high mysterious walls, and hedges intertwined with crimson flowers, among which marmalade-colored birds were trapezing, crying raucously. Hugh felt glad of his drinks now, remembering from his boyhood how the last day of the holidays was always worse if you went anywhere, how then time, that one had hoped to bemuse, would at any moment begin to glide after you like a shark following a swimmer.— ¡Box! said an advertisement. Arena Tomalín. El Balón vs. El Redondillo. The Balloon vs. the Bouncing Ball—was that? Domingo . . . But that was for Sunday; while they were only going to a bullthrowing, a purpose in life whose object was not even worth advertising. 666: also said further advertisements for an insecticide, obscure yellow tin plates at the bottom of walls, to the quiet delight of the Consul. Hugh chuckled to himself. So far the Consul was doing superbly. His few “necessary drinks,” reasonable or outrageous, had worked wonders. He was walking magnificently erect, shoulders thrown back, chest out: the best thing about it was his deceitful air of infallibility, of the unquestionable, especially when contrasted with what one must look like oneself in cowboy clothes. In his finely cut tweeds (the coat Hugh had borrowed was not much crumpled, and now Hugh had borrowed another one) and blue and white striped old Chagfordian tie, with the barbering Hugh had given him, his thick fair hair neatly slicked back, his freshly trimmed brownish greying beard, his stick, his dark glasses, who would say that he was not, unmistakably, a figure of complete respectability? And if this respectable figure, the Consul might have been saying, appeared to be undergoing from time to time a slight nutation, what of it? who noticed? It might be—for an Englishman in a foreign country always expects to meet another Englishman—merely of nautical origin. If not, his limp, obviously the result of an elephant hunt or an old brush with Pathans, excused it. The typhoon spun invisibly in the midst of a tumult of broken pavements: who was aware of its existence, let alone what landmarks in the brain it had destroyed? Hugh was laughing.

“ Plingen plangen, aufgefangen

Swingen swangen at my side,

Pootle swootle, off to Bootle,

Nemesis, a pleasant ride. ”

said the Consul mysteriously, and added with heroism, glancing about him:

“It’s really an extraordinarily nice day to take a trip.”

No se permite fijar anuncios . . .

Yvonne was in fact walking alone now: they climbed in a sort of single file, Yvonne ahead, the Consul and Hugh unevenly behind, and whatever their collective distraught soul might be thinking Hugh was oblivious of it, for he had become involved with a fit of laughing, which the Consul was trying not to find infectious. They walked in this manner because a boy was driving some cows past them down the hill, half running; and, as in a dream of a dying Hindu, steering them by their tails. Now there were some goats. Yvonne turned and smiled at him. But these goats were meek and sweet-looking, jangling little bells. Father is waiting for you though. Father has not forgotten. Behind the goats a woman with a black clenched face staggered past them under the weight of a basket loaded with carbon. A peon loped after her down the hill balancing a large barrel of ice cream on his head and calling apparently for customers, with what hope of success one could not imagine, since he seemed so burdened as to be unable either to look from side to side or to halt.

“It’s true that at Cambridge,” the Consul was saying, tapping Hugh on the shoulder, “you may have learned about Guelphs and so on . . . But did you know that no angel with six wings is ever transformed?”

“I seem to have learned that no bird ever flew with one—”

“Or that Thomas Burnet, author of the Telluris Theoria Sacra entered Christs in—Cáscaras! Caracoles! Virgen Santísima! Ave María! Fuego, fuego! Ay, qué me matan!”

With a shattering and fearful tumult a plane slammed down upon them, skimmed the frightened trees, zooming, narrowly missed a mirador, and was gone the next moment, headed in the direction of the volcanoes, from which rolled again the monotonous sound of artillery.

“Acabóse,” sighed the Consul.

Hugh suddenly noticed that a tall man (who must have stepped out of the side road Yvonne had seemed anxious they should take) with sloping shoulders and handsome, rather swarthy features, though he was obviously a European, doubtless in some state of exile, was confronting them, and it was as though the whole of this man, by some curious fiction, reached up to the crown of his perpendicularly raised Panama hat, for the gap below seemed to Hugh still occupied by something, a sort of halo or spiritual property of his body, or the essence of some guilty secret perhaps that he kept under the hat but which was now momentarily exposed, fluttering and embarrassed. He was confronting them, though smiling, it appeared, at Yvonne alone, his blue, bold protuberant eyes expressing an incredulous dismay, his black eyebrows frozen in a comedian’s arch: he hesitated: then this man, who wore his coat open and trousers very high over a stomach they had probably been designed to conceal but merely succeeded in giving the character of an independent tumescence of the lower part of his body, came forward with eyes flashing and mouth under its small black moustache curved in a smile at once false and engaging, yet somehow protective—and somehow, also, increasingly grave—came forward as it were impelled by clockwork, hand out, automatically ingratiating:

“Why Yvonne, what a delightful surprise. Why goodness me, I thought; oh, hullo, old bean—”

“Hugh, this is Jacques Laruelle,” the Consul was saying, “You’ve probably heard me speak about him at one time or another. Jacques, my young brother Hugh: ditto . . . Il vient d’arriver . . . or vice versa. How goes it, Jacques? You look as though you needed a drink rather badly.”

“—”

“—”

A minute later M. Laruelle, whose name struck only a very distant chord for Hugh, had taken Yvonne’s arm and was walking in the middle of the road with her up the hill. Probably there was no significance in this. But the Consul’s introduction had been brusque to say the least. Hugh himself felt half hurt and whatever the cause, a slight appalling sense of tension as the Consul and he slowly fell behind again. Meantime M. Laruelle was saying:

“Why do we not all drop into my ‘madhouse’; that would be good fun, don’t you think Geoffrey—ah—ah—Hugues?”

“No,” softly remarked the Consul, behind, to Hugh, who on the other hand now felt almost disposed to laugh once more. For the Consul was also saying something cloacal very quietly to himself over and over again. They were following Yvonne and her friend through the dust which now, chased by a lonely gust of wind, was moving along with them up the road, sizzling in petulant groundswirls to blow away like rain. When the wind died away the water rushing headlong down the gutters here was like a sudden force in the opposite direction.

M. Laruelle was saying attentively, ahead of them, to Yvonne:

“Yes . . . Yes . . . But your bus won’t leave till two-thirty. You have over an hour.”

—“But that does sound like an unusual bloody miracle,” Hugh said. “You mean after all these years—”

“Yeah. It was a great coincidence our meeting here,” the Consul told Hugh in a changed even tone. “But I really think you two ought to get together, you have something in common. Seriously you might enjoy his house, it’s always mildly amusing.”

“Good,” said Hugh.

“Why, here comes the cartero,” Yvonne called out ahead, half turning round and disengaging her arm from M. Laruelle’s. She was pointing to the corner on the left at the top of the hill where the Calle Nicaragua met the Calle Tierra del Fuego. “He’s simply amazing,” she was saying volubly. “The funny thing is that all the postmen in Quauhnahuac look exactly alike. Apparently they’re all from the same family and have been postmen for positively generations. I think this one’s grandfather was a cartero at the time of Maximilian. Isn’t it delightful to think of the post-office collecting all these grotesque little creatures like so many carrier pigeons to dispatch at their will?”

Why are you so voluble? Hugh wondered: “How delightful, for the post-office,” he said politely. They were all watching the cartero’s approach. Hugh happened not to have observed any of these unique postmen before. He could not have been five feet in height, and from a distance appeared like an unclassifiable but somehow pleasing animal advancing on all fours. He was wearing a colourless dungaree suit and a battered official cap and Hugh now saw he had a tiny goatee beard. Upon his small wizened face as he lunged down the street toward them in his inhuman yet endearing fashion there was the friendliest expression imaginable. Seeing them he stopped, unshouldered the bag and began to unbuckle it.

“There is a letter, a letter, a letter,” he was saying when they came up with him, bowing to Yvonne as if he’d last greeted her yesterday, “a message por el señor, for your horse,” he informed the Consul, withdrawing two packages and smiling roguishly as he undid them.

“What?—nothing for Señor Calígula.”

“Ah.” The cartero flicked through another bundle, glancing at them sideways and keeping his elbows close to his sides in order not to drop the bag. “No.” He put down the bag now altogether, and began to search feverishly; soon letters were spread all over the road. “It must be. Here. No. This is. Then this one. Ei ei ei ei ei ei.”

“Don’t bother, my dear fellow,” the Consul said. “Please.”

But the cartero tried again: “Badrona, Diosdado—”

Hugh too was waiting expectantly, not so much any word from the Globe, which would come if at all by cable, but half in hope, a hope which the postman’s own appearance rendered delightfully plausible, of another minuscule Oaxaqueñan envelope, covered with bright stamps of archers shooting at the sun, from Juan Cerillo. He listened; somewhere, behind a wall, someone was playing a guitar—badly, he was let down; and a dog barked sharply.

“—Feeshbank, Figueroa, Gómez—no, Quincey, Sandovah, no.”

At last the good little man gathered up his letters and bowing apologetically, disappointedly, lunged off down the street again. They were all looking after him, and just as Hugh was wondering whether the postman’s behavior might not have been part of some enormous inexplicable private joke, if really he’d been laughing at them the whole time, though in the kindliest way, he halted, fumbled once more at one of the packages, turned, and trotting back with little yelps of triumph, handed the Consul what looked like a postal card.

Yvonne, a little ahead again by now, nodded at him over her shoulder, smiling, as to say: “Good, you’ve got a letter after all,” and with her buoyant dancing steps walked on slowly beside M. Laruelle, up the dusty hill.

The Consul turned the card over twice, then handed it to Hugh.

“Strange—” he said.

—It was from Yvonne herself and apparently written at least a year ago. Hugh suddenly realised it must have been posted soon after she’d left the Consul and most probably in ignorance he proposed to remain in Quauhnahuac. Yet curiously it was the card that had wandered far afield: originally addressed to Wells Fargo in Mexico City, it had been forwarded by some error abroad, gone badly astray in fact, for it was date-stamped from Paris, Gibraltar, and even Algeciras, in fascist Spain.

“No, read it,” the Consul smiled.

Yvonne’s scrawl ran: “ Darling, why did I leave? Why did you let me? Expect to arrive in the U.S. to-morrow, California two days later. Hope to find a word from you there waiting. Love. Y. ”

Hugh turned the card over. There was a picture of the leonine Signal Peak on El Paso with Carlsbad Cavern Highway leading over a white-fenced bridge between desert and desert. The road turned a little corner in the distance and vanished.