VI

A wind from nowhere howled over old Mexico.

Hugh Fernhead, refreshed from his swim, lay full length on the day bed of the porch watching the clouds racing across the sky. They made him impatient to be gone. In the garden, the trees were tossing, the plantain leaves rattled, and the water was fluctuant in the pool, slapping against the sides. From the town came the fitful sounds of the fair. With one hand, in an attempt to get San Antonio, he moved the dial of the radio back and forth. News of a flood¹ was being delivered with such rapidity it gave the impression that the narrator himself was in danger of drowning. Static was rattling on, and another narrator was broadcasting in a higher, even more rapid voice, gobbling bankruptcy, disaster. While this was going on a much deeper voice told in a slower tempo of the misery blanketing a threatened capital, of people stumbling through debris littering dark streets, of hurrying thousands who sought shelter in bomb-torn darkness. Finally,—he had almost despaired of San Antonio—at his slightest touch of the dial to clarify one special unit of news or music, a voice higher than any of the others, so high indeed, it was a bawling scream, warned of stocks lower or irregularly higher, of the price of grains, cotton, metals, munitions.² With his ear inclined to the radio he thought he could hear the pulse of the world beating in its carved, latticed throat. And what a world! He couldn’t really blame anyone else wanting to escape from it, but why was it that he himself was becoming more and more irresistibly drawn to it, nightmare or no nightmare? He watched the clouds, imagining himself, as the Consul had done, upon a ship. A memory came to him of the huge, purple troughs of the Indian Ocean, the spray flung to leeward, a sister ship passing, rolling in the white caps towards home. While they were outward bound!³ Now, as then, he felt the caress of the sunlight on his eyelids and the delight his whole being experienced in the swift motion of the clouds and their shadows on the far snow of the mountains, was so great it assured him that so long as these thoughts could fever, no beloved illusion proved false, no contradictions demonstrably reconciled for convenience, no blow life dealt him, would ever destroy his faith in life itself, and that it was good. How had he never realized what a creature of luck he was until this moment! How many people, in an existence in which the living phantasy of the unconscious is held to be an illusion, had actually lived their dreams, and discovered them to be splendid? And yet, was not this what he had done? The sea, which he had wondered about day and night as a child, he had now dwelt with in all its phases, and its beauty, the agonizing truth of its reality he had harnessed for his own usage: what had Popocatepetl been if not a dream, a part of everyone’s dream, if not a touchstone of the longing of all youth? And here it was, a stark reality, swept by rushing, gigantic shadows, upon his own horizon. And Yvonne, had not she been a dream, a dream of which the sea and the love of swiftness and of strange landfalls had been a part?

She was Sokotra—⁴

Hugh shifted his position on the bed, conscious of his own strength, to which the landscape, the trees with sinewy roots going down into the earth, the implacable rocks, the triumphant mountains, each responded: Yes, I know you, and you are as strong as I. And at this moment he was touched by an odd sense of identity with the Consul, who, at the time he had first met him was always referred to as Captain Ames, late of His Majesty’s Navy. Yes, he too, poor old fellow, in his way must have dreamed of the sea,⁵ and lived it: Popocatepetl had been in his dreams and it was here: Yvonne was the fruit of this yearning and both of them loved her. But here was the difference. Whereas for himself, beyond the dreams of mountains and distances, beyond the image of the ocean, had lain calmly a land within, of wisdom and sanity, of real life, which he had visualized as only possible shared with Yvonne, for the Consul, the furthest mountain with the most beautiful name of all, which was also the name of that dearest sea waiting beyond all, was death. Another spiral had wound its way upward,⁶ and with the realization that the very forces, the very presences, which abandoned the Consul to his doom, were now obscurely, but potently, at the disposal of his own integration, a pity of the man stirred within him and a resolution to try and help in some way, to lighten his burden,⁷ shaped itself.

Hugh slewed the dial around absently, through about twenty-five degrees: an oily voice was preaching about red-blooded Americans, subversive influences, our solemn duties—God knows they were solemn enough without having these jelly-bellies⁸ say so. Below this were the voices of static. These were the gibberings of the countless poltergeists of the ether, shackled in the eternal recurrence of the sound waves, jeering without end at real and unreal alike—clacquers of the idiotic.⁹ Listen to us, they jibber-jabbered, one thing only is wrong: clarity. What, Hugh found himself asking, can I say that I really want of life, so that I can set myself apart from this confusion and declare it this or this? He didn’t know, and yet he did have the notion he was on the brink of making a tremendous decision. Or had a step of great importance to him, the first fruits of the results of which he was enjoying, been already taken without his knowing it? He laughed, for a happiness which was so great he wished his laughter could be blown to the four corners of the earth. Something he had been obliged to read recently at Stanford, by W. B. Yeats, occurred to him, something about the attitude of poets to war; implying that his own was somewhat less stern than was the general rule, Yeats had told of his being amused by the story of the sergeant spinning round and round in his entrails¹⁰ like a ballet dancer. What better attitude could be taken, Hugh was thinking, towards, also, corruptions, dishonesties, melancholias, dispossessions? And he began to think that possibly even his desire to fight in the war was less an heroic thing than a desire to share the heritage of laughter with the common people, to laugh with them as they fought, against what pretended to be serious, against what was, in effect, damned serious, but as if, nevertheless their laughter could sweep all over the world like a cleansing scourge, helping to build with it a world finally to be so full of laughter there could be no room for misery of any kind. But as certain questions presented themselves to Hugh as to which side really did have the most laughable pretensions, as to whether laughter, of the kind he meant, were really a common heritage at all and not, on the contrary a secret, almost, his professor had suggested to him, an esoteric thing, he stopped laughing: he began again to move the dial to and fro, contacting at last a station where a dance orchestra was playing a slow fox-trot with a stale, thudding accompaniment: the effect was infinitely sad and lifeless. Was this the music of humanity¹¹ at all? There was certainly no laughter here. For some reason it reminded Hugh of Poe’s Alfred Gordon Pym.¹²

But a little gnat song of a violin soaring above a racy accompaniment of guitars, drum and piano was imprisoned in the grey web at this wave length, and trying to get out: very tiny at first, it had a wiry strength of tone besides which the other band sounded as a mere dispersed moaning; it couldn’t compete at all, and gaps of silence opened in its dreary attempt at unison while this little stream of melody came bubbling through.

“Oh, I like that,” called Yvonne from her room. “Why, I know it. That’s Apple Blossoms¹³—they're broadcasting an old record. Do you hear me?” she went on, “I had that record at college, the very one, Hugh. Do you hear that? That’s Joe Venuti¹⁴—isn't he marvelous? He makes a violin sound as though it had sixteen strings!”

“He must be a very bad player,” Hugh heard the Consul say from his room; his voice was hoarse and very near and probably came over the top of the closet since the bathroom divided the two rooms.

“It’s perfectly swell,” Hugh said, loud enough for Yvonne to hear. But it had ended with a perfect coda that reminded him curiously of Conrad’s conclusion¹⁵ to the Heart of Darkness, though this little tune had been sailing into a heart of lightness, if it could be so expressed.

“—Venuti and his Hot Five,¹⁶ two of the performers, Ed Lang¹⁷ and Bix Beiderbecke¹⁸ are now dead … A high price is being given for this record by collectors … This can be purchased at the Hot Shop, 143 High Street, San Antonio.”

“Good. San Antonio at last,” Hugh called to Yvonne. It was good to have Bix Beiderbecke and Bobby Hackett¹⁹ and the old Memphis Five²⁰ in common with her as well as Sibelius and Mozart. And he thought of Paris and the Dutchman’s²¹ records.

The other side started off gaily as the first one. Some of the performers might be dead, Hugh was thinking, but for a few moments that record had been life actually tumbling over itself with ecstasy because it had defeated the dead tune.

“The other side’s grand too,” Yvonne called. “I forget the name of it and I didn’t catch it, did you?—”

But the new tune, whatever it was, which continued the youthful spirit of the first one, was growing fainter; Hugh moved the regulator to clarify it and instantly the spell was broken, a horrible rocking guffaw following the suspicion of the melody for a bar or two, then all was lost in a cosmic crash, in a gale of static.

“Oh, for the love of Pete,” said Hugh, after a while, and snapping it off angrily, heard the Consul and Yvonne quarreling.

“—no use arguing,” Yvonne was saying shrilly, “The only reason why you’re not happy—”

“You’ve got as vile a temper as your mother and a nastier voice!”

“You didn’t know how to handle her, that’s all. Anyone would have a vile temper with a man like you about the house!”

“Well, anyhow, it wasn’t,” the Consul was trying to explain, with emphasis. “It was a different poem, by W. J. Turner.²² It hadn’t anything to do at all with the old unhappy bull²³—that was something else! Don’t you remember, the boy was supposed to be doing geography but was thinking of all the wonderful names all the time. Chimborazo, Popocatepetl, had stolen his heart away. It’s in all the anthologies.”

“—of anthologies of anthologies,—yes, I know, and after all, how can you hope to remember anything accurately, drink absolutely rots your memory, any doctor will tell you—”

Slightly embarrassed by having to listen to all this but interested by the apparent ubiquity of the poem of which he had been again thinking, Hugh wandered into the kitchen to find the icebox. The maid, he gathered, had now gone out for the day—they had planned to eat later and Yvonne had invited him to help himself to what he liked if he were hungry. But in the kitchen their voices were even plainer. The Consul’s tone, possibly because he realized he might be overheard, had dropped to a mildly sarcastic one; Yvonne’s voice shrilled out as before—

“—go to England! Well, I’ve got something to say about England to you: I’m damned proud to be an American! You’re just like that old unhappy John Bull²⁴ in the forest beautiful!”

“Can’t you stick to one subject? Priscilla—”

“—stick to one subject, what are you talking about?”

“—was just the same, if you’ll excuse me. She never would let me finish what I’d started to say. She wasn’t really interested in whether I might be wrong: just in hearing the sound of her own voice, that’s all. Did you know that that was the real reason why Van Gogh cut his ear off,²⁵ because he couldn’t find anybody to listen to what he said, let alone buy what he painted!”

“He had something worth, or rather—”

“Christ how I sympathize with Rip Van Winkle!”²⁶

“Mrs. Winkle had something to be—”

“Me for the Catskills every time!”

Meditatively eating a cold turkey and mayonnaise sandwich he had made himself, Hugh, now listening with unabashed delight, attempted to piece together the fragments of what Yvonne at the moment considered to be her argument and to reconcile this with what she had said to him that morning. It was particularly amusing that she should now, in her obviously deliberate efforts to antagonize the Consul, be using his own line of an hour or two before, to which she had then been opposed. England, a hero a little earlier, was now not only the villain, but, bearing the brunt of the irritation Yvonne felt because she had confused a poem of W. J. Turner’s with one of Ralph Hodgson’s, had become, like the Consul, the old unhappy bull as well. And here, more remarkably, the general trend of their remarks revivified his own recent passage of thought, as though a recording had been made of the exchange between the ayes and noes of his cerebrations, which was now played over for his benefit.

“There’re two phases of England for you!” she was declaring. “First, the child dreaming over a map,²⁷ like Cortez, of new lands to conquer, and this isn’t altogether ugly, there are the lands just as mysterious as old Popo: and it’s just as much of a dream in the mind of man, all this far flung empire stuff, at that time! But—”

“If you don’t mind, I’m—”

“But now we come to the bull today when the child is an old man, just like that old unhappy bull who doesn’t know where his herds are any more, just like the old unhappy bull waiting for—”

“If you don’t mind, I’m an old unhappy bull waiting for that bathroom!”

“And what does that bull do? Old John Bull—why, just like the bull in the poem. He dreams about the past,” there was an angry splash, “And he has to play a cautious game because though he’s as damned bumptious as ever, he knows he stinks in the eyes of humanity, he knows that the birds are waiting for the flesh that dies,²⁸ and, in fact, he is good for nothing save the—”

Hugh now discovered, from hearing part of his own argument against England presented so unsympathetically, that he was considering the possibility he had been wrong. Even if England were blind now to what was going on in Spain, did not that merely bring them nearer to the time when they themselves would be in the same position as she? And once in that position of awful danger, which was nothing new to her, mightn’t she find that, at last, even against her own will, she was fighting the battle for democracy itself? And what was democracy? Ah, if communists and Christians would only stop being bigots and call themselves men! Whatever you thought about religion, what sounder basis upon which to reconcile contradictions could there possibly be than the simple principles of Christianity? One day, if they only realized that and acted upon it, the good people of the England of Shakespeare and Lovelace²⁹ and Robert Browning would be waking up with a roar! Even now you could hear in the movement towards the Spanish government on the part of a very few Englishmen, the muted voice of an England long asleep.³⁰ Hugh now disliked himself for having said anything against that England. It was her spirit indeed which would never die and it was in him too, as an American, just as Nathaniel Hawthorne had said in “The Gray Champion.”³¹ But the dead ride hard,³² he thought, and the question was: how hard, when they rode, were they going to ride?

“—all over and forgotten. And so will the damn fools who volunteered to fight for something that didn’t concern them,” the Consul was saying. “As for England, every sane person knows how she’s kept her head … And she will again, if anything happens! Are you listening to me? Of course everyone wants this war to stop. That’s why it would be a good thing if Franco finishes up the job as soon as possible.”

This completed the confusion, for Hugh remarked that the Consul, although for the last few minutes, from what he had heard, had been more careful not to lose his temper, probably in the interests of getting the bathroom—simply echoed, in this reasoning, as of course Hugh now saw it was inevitable that he must, only what Yvonne had an hour or two ago acknowledgedly borrowed from him, in order more or less to flout Hugh himself.

“Are you talking to me?” came from the next room, “Because if you are I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

The Consul was praying.

“Oh great gentlemanly jumping God,” he intoned, “Oh Tir-na-nÓg! Have you never read The Crock of Gold³³ where it says that Tir-na-nÓg is the heart of a man and the head of a woman? Widely they are separated. Self centered they stand and between them the seas of space are flooding desolately. No voice can shout across these shores. No, not even from the shores of my bedroom to my bathroom.”

“If you’re talking to me I can’t hear a word you’re saying. I’ve got a bathing cap on.”

At this it was obvious that the Consul made no further effort to keep his temper, by prayer or any other subterfuge. “Why didn’t you say you had finished in the bathroom? I got out of it once already for you!” he yelled. “And as for you people, you bloody people with ideas!” There was a howl like a wolf. “And that damned little Cithernhead,”³⁴ Hugh was, in fact, a shade taller than the Consul, “you’ve brought with you!”

Yvonne must have heard this for a calm voice replied, “He’s more of a man than you are, anyhow.”

“That’s just what Priscilla would always say—anyhow if he knew what I know about you he wouldn’t touch you with the end of a ten foot barge pole!”

Here the Consul departed for the bathroom: for all Hugh heard was a banged door, then the Consul crying “Ugh! Augh! Ugh!” over and over, followed by the sound of things being dropped or thrown about.

His sandwich finished, Hugh went back to the porch, and, turning on the radio again, was lucky enough to catch the middle of a Chávez broadcast.³⁵ So he lay on the day bed, smoking, wondering what a cithernhead was, waiting for someone either to come out or for Isolde to complete her transfiguration.³⁶ He tried to listen to the music, which first wounded him then moved him to indignation. Thoughts of Yvonne kept recurring to him—sad, remote, translunar, chilled by the impression he had received of her vindictiveness. But he realized there was a mysterious communication between them which prevented this impression from really touching his heart. He kept thinking, also, of something else in connection with the implication the Consul had just made concerning Yvonne. What had he meant? Vague horrors formed themselves in his brain. Anyhow, he didn’t care, whatever it was. It only made him love her more. If she would share whatever it was with him perhaps then it would cease to be horrible. But he wouldn’t ask her now: he would never ask her and he wouldn’t allow it to make the least difference to their relationship. Meantime, he felt he was not having the appropriate reactions to the music. Tears came into his eyes, but they were tears of self pity, such as one might expect to shed listening to the death of Siegfried.³⁷ The music surged with untold desire yet from this swelled an agony of self-mistrust. There was a sharp anguish in some theme recurring which turned, in his mind, into a hymn of praise for himself, who had perished with his machine-gun on the bridge, fighting for freedom. He was a hero to his comrades, but some saw through him, knowing him to be no better than that poor bastardo, the Consul. Terror clashed in the cymbals, an avenue of escape offered: but why escape? He did not want to escape: to die then? No, he didn’t want to die. Why was he there at all? He wanted to see, that was it, to see!³⁸ To comprehend! Presently in this conflict within the music, he began to feel, within him, not his own but Yvonne’s conflict within herself. He saw in a flash of understanding the truth of what the Consul had implied about these attempts to identify oneself with one side or the other being partly projections of one’s own self-dissatisfactions. Ha ha, he said grimly, they could afford to be when one was not yet fighting for dear life! And he remembered Yvonne’s disappointment at not being able to beat him in the friendly gallop they had had. Perhaps Yvonne was going through a period, through which he had himself passed, of finding herself the kind of person she despised. Aware of a passionate need to attach herself to something she was yet unable to specify it. And she was fundamentally too honest to attach herself to anything in which she did not wholly believe. To shine above all others, especially men, to beat them at their own game: Or to die, to immerse oneself in the matrix of the mass.³⁹ These were the two desires, under circumstances which she used as a further excuse for disenchantment, between which she allowed herself to be jockeyed and yet—Wagner might have suggested⁴⁰—God knows what he did not suggest, to Hitler, for instance!—a matrix is something which shapes, and did not Yvonne undoubtedly wish, just as he had wished, just as the Consul himself, for all his obsessions with death and perhaps because of them, must have wished, to be recreated? There was more than met the eye in these wavering desires and denials of desires, to cooperate in some concerted action which would help to make this stricken planet more tolerable, more in these demonstrations of contempt for the old brigade, and more in this employment of their arguments too against what one had just defended. It all appeared to signify that Yvonne didn’t really feel she could do anything concrete to help the oppressed, or really knew who the oppressed were. What truth, for you,⁴¹ she had said, quoting Melville. Speaking about, as it were, his war she had obviously meant her own, inner war. She was the one who really felt herself to be oppressed, and that, not in any economic fashion, while economics still mattered, but simply by her own inability to enjoy a complete relationship.

Now it seemed to Hugh that in these desires, necessities, contradictions, merging in the harmonies of the music, the recurring theme of a wish for death⁴² was itself immersed in an uprush of sound growing strong in his consciousness as the meaning of humanity itself: terror jabbed again, but bayonetting the mind, not the heart: while beyond it all could be heard something that to him was like the music of a new birth. He heard the sad, translunar phrases again, and felt his heart swayed by them as a plane by the wind, but beyond this sadness he was aware with all his senses of the presence of his goal, as if an Atlantic flier⁴³ should suddenly glimpse, beyond the Western Ocean, Newfoundland in the mist. And this goal was, in an inexplicable manner, freedom. Yet it was not freedom in relation to Madrid or anywhere else that he was confronted with: it was Yvonne he saw, a flaming torch among the landing lights of his thoughts, and himself, by completing his night journey across the sea,⁴⁴ splendidly the instrument of her freedom.

Fully satisfied as the music ended that everyone, not forgetting Isolde, had been successfully transfigured, and that he had now finally solved the major problems of both Yvonne’s life and his once and for all, Hugh picked up the English page⁴⁵ of El Universal lying near and began to concern himself with what their necessarily imperfect life outside had to report, offer or suggest. It reported that a “Kink” was unhappy in exile; a town counted dogs’ noses; eggs had been in a tree at Klamath Falls for a hundred years, lumberjacks had estimated by the rings of wood; that a grave had been violated; that the remains of Angela Peralta, the famous singer, were wandering in a melancholy fashion from place to place; that wars continued in China and Spain; that Americans were threatened here and there; that grave objections had been made by the public to the immodest behavior of the police chiefs of Quauhnahuac, where an ochlocracy was feared; that the clank of coins irritated at Fort Worth and that it, life itself, began at seventy. It offered at “modest sacrifices” an imported pair pure linen embroidered street extra large nearly new fur coat: a Cadillac for 500 pesos, original price 200: and for 3 pesos, 3 yards of a well-rotted cow. It suggested, for alcoholics, “anti-alcoholic fish”; and, mysteriously, if you applied at Box 7, “a white horse also.” Both offered and suggested were a “centricle apartment suitable for love nest,” “a serious, descrete apartment,” a “large well-furnished gentleman for gentleman,” and “for a young and European woman who must be pretty, acquaintanceship with a cultured man, not old, with good positions.”

In company with the Scotch terrier from next door, who was peeping over his shoulder, Hugh was gleefully absorbing this extraordinary collocation of the news when he noticed that the Consul, his face half covered with lather, had come out on to the porch. As he looked up, the Consul beckoned to him, first admonishingly placing his finger in front of his mouth, then pointing to the radio. When Hugh obediently turned this lower the other violently shook his head, so Hugh turned it on louder, and observing that the Consul, now nodding with satisfaction beckoned to him again, rose, lifting the Scotty down from the day bed, and went over towards him. He noticed that the wind had almost dropped altogether but that there was still a rather sultry breeze.

The Consul led the way to the bathroom. “Ssssh,” he lifted his finger again. “I don’t want Yvonne to know, but I’ve got the shakes so badly I can’t shave.”

“It’s no good shushing,” came from the next room, “I can hear every word you say.”

Hugh heard Yvonne give an exclamation of disgust.

“Very well, sir,” said Hugh genially, seeing that the Consul was trembling in every limb, “What’s to be done about it? What about letting me shave you? It won’t be the first time I’ve done such a thing, so you’ll be moderately safe.”

“No, that’s too much to ask,” the Consul began, but added in a whisper, “I’d be very grateful if you would, just the same.”

“Certainly.”

“Just a little down the sides, with this beard, and at the base of the neck. It’s not too difficult, I think.”

“Sure. I’ll give you the works.”

Hugh watched the Consul trying to moisten the brush again on a tablet of asses’-milk soap⁴⁶ lying in the basin, but his hand shook too badly even to accomplish this.

“Must have knocked my shaving soap down somewhere.”

“Let me do it, sir,” Hugh said, taking the brush.

“The shakes are awful. Did you ever have the shakes? The shakes are even worse than the snakes.”

“You bet,” said Hugh, trying to convey that both were part of his everyday existence. He put a towel around the Consul’s neck. “At sea we called ‘em the wheels.⁴⁷ In Yokohama, once …. yes, and in Singapore one time. Awful. I deeply sympathize. Now then, we’re all set, stand still.”

But the Consul could not stand still.

“Perhaps you’d better sit down.”

“I can’t even sit down.”

“Sure you can. I’ll help you.”

But the situation was not much better even when Hugh had the Consul sitting down.

“Jesus,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’m bouncing about as though I were in a tank. I don’t think anybody ever had such bad shakes as these, ever.”

“You better have a drink, hadn’t you? Calm your nerves.”

“Don’t let him have any more to drink, Hugh,” Yvonne called from the next room. “He’s had quite enough.”

The Consul made a movement with his foot, as if kicking Yvonne, as if kicking all exhorting womanhood, and winked at Hugh, who winked back, feeling deliciously a sense of conspiracy, but also that sense of mysterious communication and understanding with Yvonne, which managed to transcend the obnoxious impression he suspected these intramural interpolations would otherwise have made upon him.

“Where is it?” Hugh whispered.

“Never mind,” the other replied, leaning over and grasping a bottle of bay rum.⁴⁸ “What’s this like, do you think, eh? For the scalp. Find out.” Before Hugh could stop him he had taken a large drink out of the bottle. “Not bad. Not at all bad,” the Consul added, smacking his lips. “Like Pernod. A charm against galloping cockroaches anyway. Or against the all-absorbing polygonal Proustian stare of imaginary scorpions.⁴⁹ Wait a minute. I’m going to be sick.”

Hugh helped the Consul up and held his head while he vomited, to the audible disgust of Yvonne next door.

“Now I think we know each other better,” the Consul commented when this was over. “And now I think we need a real drink,” he exclaimed, producing his flask, which he had evidently overlooked. “You have one too. You deserve one.”

Hugh, finding that he was enormously enjoying himself, accepted, took a long drink and then, satisfied that the Consul was calmer, set about shaving him.

“Perhaps you’d better stay home today and rest,” he said, but the Consul flashed him, through the interstices of the soap, such a diabolical look—a look which might have queerly determined, also, the extent to which the Consul could, in this condition, be cruel, if he chose—that Hugh instantly changed the subject.

“Thalavettiparothiam,”⁵⁰ he remarked, pleasantly menacing, wiping the razor on some tissue paper and looking up through the open bathroom door into the Consul’s bedroom—the windows were open too, the curtains blew inward softly and the scents of the garden were heavy about them, so that there was really a sort of charm, Hugh felt, about the scene, in spite of all the shaking and spewing. “Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don’t be careful, as the Mexicans say.”

“The Golden Bough, eh,” muttered the Consul. “Do you see that maple tree⁵¹ outside there, propped up with those crutches of cedar?”

“Just out of the corner of my eye.”

“One of these days it’s going to collapse,” Hugh was lathering his face again and the Consul spoke haltingly, “and bring down the house with it.”

Hugh stropped the razor in a thoughtful fashion but said nothing.

“And do you see that sunflower⁵² looking in through the bedroom window?” he went on, as Hugh started shaving him once more.

“Yes. But I can’t concentrate on it. Or I’d cut you.”

“It stares into my room all day.”

“It strolled into your room?” said Hugh, busy gauging the declivity of the Consul’s beard.

“Not strolled. Stares. Fiercely, all day. Like God.”

Hugh was utterly concentrated on the job in hand.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked him at length.

“I don’t know yet,” answered the Consul, divesting himself of the towel. “But thanks a lot anyhow.”

“Oh, I haven’t finished yet.”

“What next? You weren’t in the funeral management faculty at Stanford by any chance were you? Embalmment and so forth?”

Hugh laughed, replacing the towel deftly and slowly, seeing what else had to be done to make as perfect a job of this as possible.

“That’s just the sea—we used to dodge round taking the beards off each other,” he said, feeling the edge of the razor. “As you probably know. No. I was doing a thesis on comparative religion. My method of obtaining a degree was somewhat roundabout.”

“And your method of getting a Ph.D. even more so,” sputtered the Consul and tried to laugh. “Via Madrid. Or is it Cape Horn?”

Hugh smiled, paused, then started the delicate task of shaping the Consul’s moustache.

“But you didn’t have to learn all about peripeteia⁵³ and anagnorisis and all that sort of tripe, did you?” the Consul barely managed to say, “like Yvonne. Which reminds me—”

“Don’t move, for Pete’s sake!”

“—of an old professor of mine who was almost as expert on wines as he was on English Literature and rare books. But he was such a souse he got them mixed up. ‘Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?’⁵⁴ he would roar. ‘You know, some of the genuine old 1611.’⁵⁵ Or he would whisper confidentially: ‘I’ve got some fine old Massinger Burgundy I’d like you to try, frightfully rare edition—pirated I believe, but ssh!—with such an exquisite, delicate flavor.’” Hugh shouted with laughter at this and paused, surveying his handiwork.

“He used to tell us too all about how you have to go back to Aristotle for the right questions⁵⁶ rather than the right answers,” the Consul went on. “I always thought it excessively funny that Yvonne should have to go back to Aristotle for the right questions.”

Hugh said nothing, doing what he was doing. Outside he could hear the radio playing a gay tune.

“I hope you’re not just running your head into a noose with my little gal,” the Consul stammered, as Hugh now gradually shook some life into him, kneading his neck and the small of his back. “I can’t help being anxious about her,” he lowered his voice. “Do you know what I think, a few years ago, she’s the sort of girl who’d have come to a violent end—and it doesn’t make it any easier for her having a father like you, does it?” he added, peering into the mirror which Hugh held out for him, then almost immediately withdrew, to continue his job of deftly massaging him between his shoulder blades.

“Innumerable lovers,” said the Consul, trying to look up, “and then, you know, the old high dive. Whisht—right under the paddlewheel of the Lackawanna ferry!⁵⁷ Or, Co-ed slaying at midnight shambles. That’s one thing to be said for Girton,”⁵⁸ he went on, as Hugh helped him to his feet. “I’m sure they never had midnight shambles.”⁵⁹ He looked in the shaving mirror which Hugh held out again. “I think you’ve made a pretty good job of preparing the corpse now. Thanks a million.”

“I think we might finish you off with some of this,” Hugh said, picking up a tube of hair cream. “Donnant aux chevaux un lustre brillant et soyeux les fixant en tous sens sans les ternir de pellicules blanchâtres,”⁶⁰ he added.

“I like that bit about the pellicules,” said the Consul. “Well, we could try. There’s probably more in that, since it’s undrinkable. I see you really speak French.” Hugh carefully combed his hair moistened with the fixatif parfait sans gomme. “Well, I had my first whore in France; got married there too—which comes to much the same thing. By the way, you should meet my friend Laruelle.”

Hugh stood aside from him, wiping his hands on a towel and looking at the Consul critically.

“Un hombre nuevo,” he remarked with satisfaction.

“A work of art I’m sure,” said the Consul. Hugh helped him to his feet. “And look here,” he added, “I ought to have thought of it before. Why don’t you come and be our house guest for a while? It’s silly to stay all by yourself in some dump.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Hugh. “I’ll be delighted.”

“Not a bit. I was just thinking you might be able to do this kind of thing for me every day. Come down tonight then.”

“Thank you. I’d love to.”

A little later, observing him closely as he sat on the bed drawing on a freshly pressed pair of trousers he had found for him, Hugh still thought the Consul looked a new man: but what was more surprising was that, now he had smoothed all the yesterdays away, the Consul had not even any particular air of dissipation. He did not possess in the least, as one might have suspected, the haggard look of a depraved, worn out, old man. It was as though the passionate narcissism which drinking and his almost purely oral response to life entailed had fixed his age at some time in the past, at that unidentifiable moment, perhaps, when his persistent objective self, weary of standing askance and watching his downfall, had silently withdrawn from him altogether, like a ship secretly leaving harbor at night.

The Consul took another quick drink before going to the bathroom again, forgot what he’d gone for, and as he returned to the bedroom, Hugh imagined the chattering of the intoxicated nonsense of his thoughts following him wherever he went, swaying about in the room with the weird tin masks and serapes,⁶¹ filling it with jitters, and when he stood by the bed again, Hugh saw he looked at it with apprehension.

“What are you looking for?”

“It’s all right now. I thought someone was sitting on the edge of the bed. I’m just looking for my saco.”

“I have it.”

“Isn’t saco a hell of a word for coat,” remarked the Consul, as Hugh helped him into it, “It makes me feel like the Count of Monte Cristo.”⁶²

When the Consul sat down once more it was with the deliberation of one who gathers his remaining energies together to face the order of the day. He held out his hand, palm upwards, to him. How small and simple it was, lineless and unarticulated! The Consul might have experienced nothing whatsoever. He turned away, sorry for him.

“You see, Hugh,” he said, “That crease⁶³ there is—Yvonne? What will happen to her, I wonder. I’m often afraid. What’s that little bit of Kipling’s⁶⁴ about: ‘the sharp Aegean rocks between a little virgin drowned.’ No, I don’t think you’ll find her that, do you mind?”

Hugh, absorbed in a photograph of a ship on the wall, pretended not to hear, but just the same, did hear and without knowing why was not angry or hurt. This was not entirely because he liked the Consul, in spite of his unpleasant first impressions, and probably would continue to like him whatever breaches of decency he committed: nor was it because he was beginning to understand and sympathize with, more completely, the extent of the ravagement of his mind. He could not be angry because he realized at this moment that however dangerous the Consul might still be, he was, finally, helpless. What did his defences avail him now, his wit, his childish brutality? Less than whipping the sea, the defacing of his mother’s house. What use were talons and fangs to the dying tiger?

“It’s really unforgivable of me to speak like that,” the Consul said, “But you must forgive me. Do you know—looking at you, I was thinking I never had a son. My wife didn’t want any more children.”

Hugh turned round, and there was a real tenderness in his eyes. He was overcome by a strange emotion. The situation was reversed and the Consul was his son. He remembered an incident his eldest brother had told him, of how, during the war, on the last day spent at home before leaving for France, he had wished to go out to the barber’s, but his father, not wanting to lose those precious moments and also perhaps partly because, without being aware of it, he desired to be as near to his son as possible the last time he might ever see him alive, had offered to shave him instead, which he did, something his brother had always remembered with such a special gratitude that it had often seemed to Hugh it was the fondest memory he had of him.

In the light of this recollection, the Consul now appeared to be more pitiable and helpless than ever.

“Is this your old ship?” Hugh asked to conceal his emotion, indicating the photograph on the wall.

The Consul came over to him and eyed it with his head on one side.

“That’s her. The good old Samaritan,”⁶⁵ he said. “You see those windlasses and bulkheads, they’re false. That black entrance that looks as though it might be the entrance to the fo’c’sle, that’s false too, there’s an anti-aircraft gun stowed away snugly in there but you don’t get at it that way. Over there, that’s the way you go down. Those were my quarters: there’s the quartermaster’s alleyway. That galley—it could become a battery in a twinkling of an eye!”

“She’s striped like a zebra.”

“Yes,” said the Consul. “But do you see what it says underneath? ‘So verliess ich den⁶⁶ Weltteil unserer Antipoden!’ I cut this out of a German paper, and that actually refers to the Emden.⁶⁷ Here’s us—” he pointed to the Gothic German writing, “‘Der englische Dampfer trägt Schutzfarben gegen deutsche U-Boote.’ Approximately!”

“How long do you think it’ll be before they’re at it again?” asked Hugh.

“Who knows?” said the Consul. “But it’s your turn next, my boy. Everybody’ll be in the next one. Even Mexico maybe. She’s infested with Huns, signs of the dicktaster everywhere. But then,” he added, “You’ve been to sea before, haven’t you? That must have been like a war itself the first time.”

“I was down below,” laughed Hugh. “The first watch I had I went to sleep in a coal bunker and dreamed I was in Switzerland!”

“A trimmer!”⁶⁸ exclaimed the Consul. “Ha—you’ve come straight out of Dante’s Inferno to get me! You un diablo, as our friend the doctor says—”

“How come? I can’t read Dante.”

“The trimmers are the individuals who are not good enough for heaven, not bad enough for hell,” said the Consul. “Politically speaking they have a kinship with that celebrated English Vicar,⁶⁹ lately domiciled at Bray.”

“That’s me all right,” said Hugh.

Looking up at the ship again Hugh found the intricacies of the camouflage fascinating him to such an extent that for a while, as he tried to make sense of them, the world and its overt perplexities vanished, leaving nothing but the problem of secrecy itself, the tremendous potency of what the world concealed filling even the place of the ship. Hugh felt that if he persisted in the contemplation of this abstract secrecy he would be led to some overawing discovery but, relaxing his attention, the Samaritan and the world moved back into place. Standing there with the Consul, Hugh’s consciousness of his identity with him was renewed: but now, as he looked at the Samaritan and its long thin barber’s pole of a funnel, he imagined it to be his ship, Yvonne’s and his, mysterious as their own future, which was to carry them away to the unpathed waters and undreamed of shores⁷⁰ of the Shakespeare lesson at school.

“Have a drink,” invited the Consul and Hugh took the flask.

“To your old ship.”

“To your future,” returned the Consul, taking back the flask.

The two men went out on the porch: two sailors going out on deck. The sunlight swooped at them over the porch and in the sudden brilliance, the trees in the garden appeared to be fainting, drugged with light and wind. The Consul picked up the paper, which Hugh had left on a table, and adjusted his dark glasses.

“What’s all this,” he exclaimed. “Or do I read aright? Japanese astride all roads from Shanghai, Americans evacuate.”⁷¹

“You read aright,” laughed Hugh, looking over his shoulder, and feeling a fine, ferocious stimulation from the drinks he had had, and again an overweening impatience to be gone.

“It sounds vaguely cloacal to me,” remarked the Consul.

They were both roaring with laughter, the Scotty, who had been meekly waiting, jumping up at them and barking, when Yvonne brightly emerged on the porch.

“What are you men being so cute about?” she inquired, as if there had been no scene. “You’re looking very nice, Father. And just look at the puppy! What’s in the paper?”

“Clank of coins irritates at Forth Worth,” said the Consul, still reading the paper, “How’s that, Hugh?”

“Oh well, who cares,” said Hugh rather impatiently, for the sight of Yvonne after the Consul’s remarks confused him. He got up again, the Scotty jumping off his lap to the floor, panting, with his mouth open and tongue hanging out, and every little while giving an involuntary movement like a runner’s false start.

“We could go to the zoo,”⁷² the Consul suggested, “If we want to get back today.”

“If we want to get back at all,” Yvonne put in, looking at herself in a tin Taxco mirror⁷³ on the porch, “How do you like this hat?”

“But I thought it was all settled where we were going,” groaned Hugh. “Don’t let’s start all that again—hullo, who’s whistling?”

“It’s the ambassador, practicing diplomacy,” said the Consul. “On Angus.”

“Do you remember that man who whistled for souls in Paris,⁷⁴ Hugh?” said Yvonne, her hat at another angle. “He whistled the evil spirits away.”

“Why don’t you put on a beret, that hat’s too smart,” said Hugh.

There was more whistling but Angus ignored it and sat with his tongue out vibrating adoringly at Yvonne.

“One always heard zoos had a therapeutic quality,” the Consul said. “If anyone’s in favor. They always have had zoos in Mexico,⁷⁵ apparently. Montezuma, courteous fellow, even showed stout Cortez⁷⁶ around a zoo. When he heard the rattlesnake he thought he was in the infernal regions.”

“No me gusta.” Yvonne shivered, not paying any attention, arranging her hat this way and that in the mirror. “He could have seen them in our garden any day.”

“Also we could see the tepezcuintle.”

Yvonne gave her father a punishing look. “I’m not sure you don’t,” she said. “Why bother to go to the zoo?” She sat down and took off her hat.

“But I thought you wanted to go to Chapultepec,” Hugh said.

“You were the one who wanted to go—to see a bull or something.”

“Yvonne—” Hugh drew a deep breath, counted ten slowly, and said placatingly, “all right then. We stay home, is that it?”

“My God no!” She jumped up and began pacing up and down. “Haven’t you ever had a hangover?”

“Sure,” Hugh grinned up at her. “But not any more than I can help, recently anyhow. It isn’t worth it. Drinking doesn’t seem to agree with my stomach.”

“Nor mine,” said the Consul, pouring himself a large drink.

“Nor mine,” said Yvonne, between her teeth. She put on her hat again and shifted the whole thing around the other way, peeking at herself with her head first on one side, then on the other, like a red bird. Hugh looked at her, feeling a strange, sinking ecstasy.

“A dog,” the Consul muttered, “Coclogenus paca Mexico.”⁷⁷

Yvonne clicked her tongue, half deprecatingly because she couldn’t get the angle of the hat right, half because of the little terrier which was jumping up at her now, this passive appeal to the others had failed. Now the hat seemed to be right, she stooped to the dog, clicking her tongue still in the strange language used to hats, dogs and little children. “Well Angus isn’t any tepez whatsis is he Angus isn’t a cocolorum is he no he says—”

“No,” said the Consul, lighting his pipe and feeling that at any moment he might put out wings and go soaring away over the valley with the seven year locust,⁷⁸ or the coppery tailed trogon,⁷⁹ that ambiguous, ambiguous bird, over towards the Canyon of the Wolves.⁸⁰ “It’s not. Definitely. Only a sort of dog. A kind of high class scavenger. A groomed hyena.” He cupped his hands and shouted over to the other house. “Your dog’s here, mister.”

“But we couldn’t go anyhow with the car out of commission—oh blast this hat,” she turned to the mirror yet again. “And who wants to see an old hyena?”

Hugh, watching them, was thinking: Jesus! What was this pathological obsession with the piddling, this nightmare of indecision: why did they spend half their life suffering it, trying stupidly to make up their minds, wasting time about things that were of no goddamned importance to anyone? He started despairingly to tinker with the radio.

“Well,” said Yvonne, “aren’t we ever going to get started? Let’s get the hell out of here. I’m just going to put on my beret. I don’t like this hat anyhow. Won’t be a split second.” She went inside and Hugh was left alone with the Consul on the bridge-like porch.

From the bottom of the pool below them a reflected small sun blazed and nodded away among the inverted papayas: shadows 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 snow peaks of the Sierra Madre.

“Wee-wee! Wee-wee!” fluted the diplomatist, still practicing diplomacy, but weakening.

“Let’s go to Chapultepec,” came from Yvonne’s bedroom.

“We’re going to Chapultepec!” shouted Hugh with real savagery, not caring whether he was being rude to either of them.

The XI division of infantry⁸¹ started blazing away again in the foothills. A train hooted: an approaching steamer.

Yvonne reappeared looking very vivid and lovely in the beret and Hugh noticed with stupefaction that she had changed her clothes again and was wearing a white suit.

Suddenly Yvonne was shrieking “Look out! There’s a scorpion, kill it!”⁸²

There it was, like a little violin, a little ghost of Venuti’s violin, low on the wall and Angus was pawing at it, interested, wanting to play.

Her father smiled, looking, “It’s a beautiful creature, just like old Bull’s⁸³ violin, I’m sure.”

“Kill it!” Yvonne screamed. “It’ll kill Angus!” Hugh started for it but before he could get there Yvonne killed it herself with one blow of her huarache.⁸⁴ “You men of action,” she said, going in again.

“A curious bird is the scorpion,”⁸⁵ the Consul observed in a sing-song voice. “He cares not for priest or for poor peón … Shall I go on? Or can you?”

“I couldn’t,” said Hugh.

“You know,” the Consul went on, “That scorpion knew what was going to happen to it. Did you see it begin to scamper? Then it decided it was no use, it might as well die with its boots on. For the scorpion the world ends with a bang,”⁸⁶ he added. “But it really wasn’t any use killing it, they sting themselves to death anyhow.”⁸⁷

As the Consul spoke Hugh began to laugh, although another self warned him that this doldrums in which they found themselves was a reflection of something else not so funny: a reflection of a common state of mind of people everywhere waiting like this, waiting, under the volcano, for the order to kill, for the word to change, for the permission to begin to accomplish everything at once, for the license to continue to do nothing for ever.

As though there were too much time, as though there were not enough to hear, to see, and love, for which one’s own mind and body were the only dictators!

His laughter grew uncontrollable. The radio that started to blare away abruptly, the Consul watching him with a funereal hilarity, the clock wheezing in the distance after its nine strokes had reminded them it was seven minutes past one, even the trumpet flowers in the garden silently shaking their caps and bells, all seemed to join in this mirth.

“Hugh! Have you gone crazy!” said Yvonne, from the doorway. “What are you laughing at?”

“At everyone who is not laughing!” he replied, “because we still exist!”⁸⁸