Under The Volcano Part 5

"So would I." Yvonne did not look at him.

"Then you don't know whether you have divorced him or not?"

"Oh, I've--divorced him," she answered unhappily.

"But you don't know whether you've gone back to him or not?"

"Yes. No... Yes. I've gone back to him all right all right." Hugh was silent while another leaf fell, crashed and hung tilted, balanced in the undergrowth. "Then wouldn't it be rather simpler for you if I went away immediately," he asked her gently, "instead of staying on a little while as I'd hoped?--I'd been thinking of going to Oaxaca for a day or two anyhow--"

Yvonne had raised her head at the word Oaxaca. "Yes," she said. "Yes, it might. Though, oh Hugh, I don't like to say it, only--"

"Only what?"

"Only please don't go away till we've talked it over. I'm so frightened."

Hugh was paying for the beers, which were only twenty centavos; thirty less than the armadillo, he thought. "Or do you want another?" He had to raise his voice above the renewed clamour of the plant: dungeons: dungeons: dungeons: it said.

"I can't finish this one. You finish it for me."

Their cavalcade moved off again slowly, out of the courtyard, through the ma.s.sive gate into the road beyond. As by common consent they turned right, away from the railway station. A camion was approaching behind them from the town and Hugh reined in beside Yvonne while the dog herded the foals along the ditch. The bus--Tomalin: Zocalo--disappeared, clanging round a corner. "That's one way to get to Parian." Yvonne averted her face from the dust.

"Wasn't that the Tomalin bus?"

"Just the same it's the easiest way to get to Parian. I think there is a bus goes straight there, but from the other end of the town, and by another road, from Tepalzanco."

"There seems to be something sinister about Parian."

"It's a very dull place actually. Of course it's the old capital of the state. Years ago there used to be a huge monastery there, I believe--rather like Oaxaca in that respect. Some of the shops and even the cantinas are part of what were once the monks' quarters. But it's quite a ruin."

"I wonder what Weber sees in it," Hugh said. They left the cypresses and the plant behind. Having come, unwarned, to a gateless level-crossing they turned right once more, this time heading homeward.

They were riding abreast down the railway lines Hugh had seen from the grove, flanking the grove in almost the opposite direction to the way they had approached. On either side a low embankment sloped to a narrow ditch, beyond which stretched scrub-land. Above them telegraph wires tw.a.n.ged and whined: guitarra guitarra guitarra: which was, perhaps, a better thing to say than dungeons . The railway--a double track but of narrow gauge--now divagated away from the grove, for no apparent reason, then wandered back again parallel to it. A little farther on, as if to balance matters, it made a similar deviation towards the grove. But in the distance it curved away in a wide leftward sweep of such proportions one felt it must logically come to involve itself again with the Tomalin road. This was too much for the telegraph poles that strode straight ahead arrogantly and were lost from sight.

Yvonne was smiling. "I see you look worried. There's really a story for your Globe in this line."

"I can't make out what sort of d.a.m.n thing it is at all."

"It was built by you English. Only the company was paid by the kilometre."

Hugh laughed loudly. "How marvellous. You don't mean it was laid out in this c.o.c.keyed fas.h.i.+on just for the sake of the extra mileage, do you?" "That's what they say. Though I don't suppose it's true." "Well, well. I'm disappointed. I'd been thinking it must be some delightful Mexican whimsey. It certainly gives one to think however."

"Of the capitalist system?" There was again a hint of mockery about Yvonne's smile.

"It reminds one of some story in Punch ... Did you know there was a place called Punch in Kashmir by the by?" (Yvonne murmured, shaking her head.) "--Sorry, I've forgotten what I was going to say."

"What do you think about Geoffrey?" Yvonne asked the question at last. She was leaning forward, resting on the pommel, watching him sideways. "Hugh, tell me the truth. Do you think there's any--well--hope for him?" Their mares were picking their way delicately along this unusual lane, the foals keeping farther ahead than before, glancing round from time to time for approbation at their daring. The dog ran ahead of the foals though he never failed to dodge back periodically to see all was well. He was sniffing busily for snakes among the metals.

"About his drinking, do you mean?"

"Do you think there's anything I can do?"

Hugh looked down at some blue wildflowers like forget-me-nots that had somehow found a place to grow between the sleepers on the track. These innocents had their problem too: what is this frightful dark sun that roars and strikes at our eyelids every few minutes? Minutes? Hours more likely. Perhaps even days: the lone semaph.o.r.es seemed permanently up, it might be sadly expeditious to ask about trains oneself. "I dare say you've heard about his 'strychnine,' as he calls it," Hugh said. "The journalist's cure. Well, I actually got the stuff by prescription from some guy in Quauhnahuac who knew you both at one time."

"Dr. Guzman?"

"Yes, Guzman. I think that was the name. I tried to persuade him to see Geoff. But he refused to waste time on him. He said simply that so far as he knew there was nothing wrong with Papa and never had been save that he wouldn't make up his mind to stop drinking. That seems plain enough and I dare say it's true." The track sank level with the scrub-land, then below it, so that the embankments were now above them, "It isn't drinking, somehow," Yvonne said suddenly. "But why does he do it?"

"Perhaps now you've come back like this he'll stop."

"You don't sound very hopeful."

"Yvonne, listen to me. So obviously there are a thousand things to say and there isn't going to be time to say most of them. It's difficult to know where to begin. I'm almost completely in the dark. I wasn't even sure you were divorced till five minutes ago. I don't know--" Hugh clicked his tongue at his horse but held her back. "As for Geoff," he went on, "I simply have no idea what he's been doing or how much he's been drinking. Half the time you can't tell when he's tight anyway."

"You couldn't say that if you were his wife ."

"Wait a minute.--My att.i.tude towards Geoff was simply the one I'd take towards some brother scribe with a G.o.dawful hangover. But while I've been in Mexico City I've been saying to myself: Cui bono? What's the good? Just sobering him up for a day or two's not going to help. Good G.o.d, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days it'd die of remorse on the third--"

"That's very helpful," Yvonne said. "Thank you." "Besides after a while one begins to feel, if a man can hold his liquor as well as that why shouldn't he drink?" Hugh leaned over and patted her horse. "No, seriously, why don't both of you get out, though? Out of Mexico. There's no reason for you to stay any longer, is there? Geoff loathed the consular service anyway." For a moment Hugh watched one of the foals standing silhouetted against the sky on top of the embankment. "You've got money."

"You'll forgive me when I tell you this, Hugh. It wasn't because I didn't want to see you. But I tried to get Geoffrey to leave this morning before you came back."

"It was no go, eh?"

"Maybe it wouldn't have worked anyhow. We tried it before, this getting away and starting all over. But Geoffrey said something this morning about going on with his book--for the life of me I don't know whether he's still writing one or not, he's never done any work on it since I've known him, and he's never let me see scarcely any of it, still, he keeps all those reference books with him--and I thought--"

"Yes," Hugh said, "how much does he really know about all this alchemy and cabbala business? How much does it mean to him?"

"That's just what I was going to ask you. I've never been able to find out--"

"Good lord, I don't know..." Hugh added with almost avuncular relish: "Maybe he's a black magician!"

Yvonne smiled absently, flicking her reins against the pommel. The track emerged into the open and once more the embankments sloped down on either side. High overhead sailed white sculpturings of clouds, like billowing concepts in the brain of Michelangelo. One of the foals had strayed from the track into the scrub. Hugh repeated the ritual of whistling, the foal hauled itself back up the bank and they were a company again, trotting smartly along the meandering selfish little railroad. "Hugh," Yvonne said, "I had an idea coming down on the boat... I don't know whether--I've always dreamed of having a farm somewhere. A real farm, you know, with cows and pigs and chickens--and a red barn and silos and fields of corn and wheat."

"What, no guinea-fowl? I might have a dream like that in a week or two," Hugh said. "Where does the farm come in?"

"Why--Geoffrey and I might buy one." "Buy one?"

"Is that so fantastic?"

"I suppose not, but where?" Hugh's pint-and-a-half of strong beer was beginning to take pleasurable effect, and all at once he gave a guffaw that was more like a sneeze. "I'm sorry," he said, "it was just the notion of Geoff among the alfalfa, in overalls and a straw hat, soberly hoeing, that got me a moment."

"It wouldn't have to be as soberly as all that. I'm not an ogre." Yvonne was laughing too, but her dark eyes, that had been s.h.i.+ning, were opaque and withdrawn, "But what if Geoff hates farms? Perhaps the mere sight of a cow makes him seasick."

"Oh no. We often used to talk about having a farm in the old days."

"Do you know anything about farming?"

"No." Yvonne abruptly, delightfully, dismissed the possibility, leaning forward and stroking her mare's neck. "But I wondered if we mightn't get some couple who'd lost their own farm or something actually to run it for us and live on it."

"I wouldn't have thought it exactly a good point in history to begin to prosper as the landed gentry, but still maybe it is. Where's this farm to be?"

"Well... What's to stop us going to Canada, for instance?"

.".. Canada? ... Are you serious? Well, why not, but--"

"Perfectly."

They had now reached the place where the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right (above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along the margin of the woods. They approached this road slowly, following the single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through the scrub.

" I mean why Canada more than British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an admirable place for one's teeth, I've heard. Then there's Gough Island, hard by Tristan. That's uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois--my favourite island in the Arabian Sea." But Hugh's tone though amused was not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to pa.s.s off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical solutions. He caught up with her.

"Hasn't Geoffrey mentioned his genteel Siberia to you lately?" she said. "You surely haven't forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?"

"On a lake, isn't it? Pineaus Lake. I remember. But there isn't any house on it, is there? And you can't graze cattle on fircones and hardpan."

"That's not the point, Hugh."

"Or would you propose to camp on it and have your farm elsewhere?"

"Hugh, listen--"

"But suppose you could only buy your farm in some place like Saskatchewan," Hugh objected. An idiotic verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse's hooves: Oh take me back to Poor Fish River, Take me back to Onion Lake, You can keep the Guadalquivir, Como you may likewise take.

Take me back to dear old Horsefly, Aneroid or Gravelburg....

"In some place with a name like Product. Or even Dumble," he went on. "There must be a Dumble. In fact I know there's a Dumble."

"All right. Maybe it is ridiculous. But at least it's better than sitting here doing nothing!" Almost crying, Yvonne angrily urged her horse into a brief wild canter, but the terrain was too rough; Hugh reined in beside her and they halted together.

"I'm awfully, dreadfully sorry." Contrite, he took her bridle. "I was just being more than unusually b.l.o.o.d.y stupid."

"Then you do think it's a good idea?" Yvonne brightened slightly, even contriving again an air of mockery.

"Have you ever been to Canada?" he asked her.

"I've been to Niagara Falls."

They rode on, Hugh still holding her bridle. "I've never been to Canada at all. But a Canuck in Spain, a fisherman pal of mine with the Macs-Paps, used to keep telling me it was the most terrific place in the world. British Columbia, at any rate."

"That's what Geoffrey used to say too."

"Well, Geoff's liable to be vague on the subject. But here's what McGoff told me. This man was a Pict. Suppose you land in Vancouver, as seems reasonable. So far not so good. McGoff didn't have much use for modern Vancouver. According to him it has a sort of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you p.r.i.c.k them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pa.s.s through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet... As for drinking, by the way, that is beset," Hugh chuckled, "everywhere beset by perhaps favourable difficulties. No bars, only beer parlours so uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it's too far to get a bottle--"

"But--" They were both laughing.

"But wait a minute." Hugh looked up at the sky of New Spain. It was a day like a good Joe Venuti record. He listened to the faint steady droning of the telegraph poles and the wires above them that sang in his heart with his pint-and-a-half of beer. At this moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it destroys at one fell swoop...

"The thing to do," he went on, "is to get out of Vancouver as fast as possible. Go down one of the inlets to some fis.h.i.+ng village and buy a shack slap spang on the sea, with only foresh.o.r.e rights, for, say a hundred dollars. Then live on it this winter for about sixty a month. No phone. No rent. No consulate. Be a squatter. Call on your pioneer ancestors. Water from the well. Chop your own wood. After all, Geoff's as strong as a horse. And perhaps he'll be able really to get down to his book and you can have your stars and the sense of the seasons again; though you can sometimes swim late as November. And get to know the real people: the Seine fishermen, the old boat builders, the trappers, according to McGoff the last truly free people left in the world. Meantime you can get your island fixed up and find out about your farm, which previously you'll have used as a decoy for all you're worth, if you still want it by then--" "Oh Hugh, yes --"

He all but shook her horse with enthusiasm. "I can see your shack now. It's between the forest and the sea and you've got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You'll have to go through the woods to the store." Hugh saw the store in his mind's eye. The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come cras.h.i.+ng down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you'll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.

They were galloping... Bare level plain had taken the place of the scrub and they'd been cantering briskly, the foals prancing delightedly ahead, when suddenly the dog was a shoulder-shrugging streaking fleece, and as their mares almost imperceptibly fell into the long untrammelled undulating strides, Hugh felt the sense of change, the keen elemental pleasure one experienced too on board a s.h.i.+p which, leaving the choppy waters of the estuary, gives way to the pitch and swing of the open sea. A faint carillon of bells sounded in the distance, rising and falling, sinking back as if into the very substance of the day. Judas had forgotten; nay, Judas had been, somehow, redeemed.

They were galloping parallel to the road which was hedgeless and on ground level, then the thudding regular thunder of the hooves struck abruptly hard and metallic and dispersed and they were clattering on the road itself; it bore away to the right skirting the woods round a sort of headland jutting into the plain. "We're on the Calle Nicaragua again," Yvonne shouted gaily, "almost!"

At a full gallop they were approaching the Malebolge once more, the serpentine barranca, though at a point much farther up than where they'd first crossed it; they were trotting side by side over a white-fenced bridge: then, all at once, they were in the ruin. Yvonne was in it first, the animals seeming to be checked less by the reins than by their own decision, possibly nostalgic, possibly even considerate, to halt. They dismounted. The ruin occupied a considerable stretch of the gra.s.sy roadside on their right hand. Near them was what might once have been a chapel, with gra.s.s on which the dew still sparkled growing through the floor. Elsewhere were the remains of a wide stone porch with low crumbled bal.u.s.trades. Hugh, who had quite lost his bearings, secured their mares to a broken pink pillar that stood apart from the rest of the desuetude, a meaningless mouldering emblem.

"What is all this ex-splendour anyway?" he said.

"Maximilian's Palace. The summer one, I think. I believe all that grove effect by the brewery was once part of his grounds too." Yvonne looked suddenly ill at ease.

"Don't you want to stop here?" he had asked her.

"Sure. It's a good idea. I'd like a cigarette," she said hesitantly. "But we'll have to stroll down a ways for Carlotta's favourite view."

"The emperor's mirador certainly has seen better days." Hugh, rolling Yvonne a cigarette, glanced absently round the place, which appeared so reconciled to its own ruin no sadness touched it; birds perched on the blasted towers and dilapidated masonry over which clambered the inevitable blue convolvulus; the foals with their guardian dog resting near were meekly grazing in the chapel: it seemed safe to leave them...

"Maximilian and Carlotta, eh?" Hugh was saying. "Should Juarez have had the man shot or not?"

"It's an awfully tragic story."

"He should have had old thingmetight, Diaz, shot at the same time and made a job of it."

They came to the headland and stood gazing back the way they had come, over the plains, the scrub, the railway, the Tomalin road. It was blowing here, a dry steady wind. Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. There they lay peacefully enough beyond the valley; the firing had ceased. Hugh felt a pang. On the way down he'd entertained a quite serious notion of finding time to climb Popo, perhaps even with Juan Cerillo-- "There's your moon for you still," he pointed it out again, a fragment blown out of the night by a cosmic storm.

"Weren't those wonderful names," she said, "the old astronomers gave the places on the moon?"

"The Marsh of Corruption. That's the only one I can remember."

"Sea of Darkness... Sea of Tranquillity..."

They stood side by side without speaking, the wind tearing cigarette smoke over their shoulders; from here the valley too resembled a sea, a galloping sea. Beyond the Tomalin road the country rolled and broke its barbarous waves of dunes and rocks in every direction. Above the foothills, spiked along their rims with firs, like broken bottles guarding a wall, a white onrush of clouds might have been poised breakers. But behind the volcanoes themselves he saw now that storm clouds were gathering. "Sokotra," he thought, "my mysterious island in the Arabian Sea, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from, and no one has ever been--"

There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful pa.s.sword of courage and pride--the pa.s.sionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one's soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right. It was as though he were gazing now beyond this expanse of plains and beyond the volcanoes out to the wide rolling blue ocean itself, feeling it in his heart still, the boundless impatience, the immeasurable longing.

5.

Behind them walked the only living thing that shared their pilgrimage, the dog. And by degrees they reached the briny sea. Then, with souls well disciplined they reached the northern region, and beheld, with heaven aspiring hearts, the mighty mountain Himavat... Whereupon the lake was lapping, the lilacs were blowing, the chenars were budding, the mountains were glistening, the waterfalls were playing, the spring was green, the snow was white, the sky was blue, the fruit blossoms were clouds: and he was still thirsty. Then the snow was not glistening, the fruit blossoms were not clouds, they were mosquitoes, the Himalayas were hidden by dust, and he was thirstier than ever. Then the lake was blowing, the snow was blowing, the waterfalls were blowing, the fruit blossoms were blowing, the seasons were blowing--blowing away--he was blowing away himself, whirled by a storm of blossoms into the mountains, where now the rain was falling. But this rain, that fell only on the mountains, did not a.s.suage his thirst. Nor was he after all in the mountains. He was standing, among cattle, in a stream. He was resting, with some ponies, knee-deep beside him in the cool marshes. He was lying face downward drinking from a lake that reflected the white-capped ranges, the clouds piled five miles high behind the mighty mountain Himavat: the purple chenars and a village nestling among the mulberries. Yet his thirst still remained unquenched. Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but lightness, and promise of lightness--how could he be drinking promise of lightness? Perhaps because he was drinking, not water, but certainty of brightness--how could he be drinking certainty of brightness? Certainty of brightness, promise of lightness, of light, light, light, and again, of light, light, light, light, light!

... The Consul, an inconceivable anguish of horripilating hangover thunderclapping about his skull, and accompanied by a protective screen of demons gnattering in his ears, became aware that in the horrid event of his being observed by his neighbours it could hardly be supposed he was just sauntering down his garden with some innocent horticultural object in view. Nor even that he was sauntering. The Consul, who had waked a moment or two ago on the porch and remembered everything immediately, was almost running. He was also lurching. In vain he tried to check himself, plunging his hands, with an extraordinary attempt at nonchalance, in which he hoped might appear more than a hint of consular majesty, deeper into the sweat-soaked pockets of his dress trousers. And now, rheumatisms discarded, he really was running... Might he not, then, be reasonably suspected of a more dramatic purpose, of having a.s.sumed, for instance, the impatient buskin of a William Blackstone leaving the Puritans to dwell among the Indians, or the desperate mien of his friend Wilson when he so magnificently abandoned the University Expedition to disappear, likewise in a pair of dress trousers, into the jungles of darkest Oceania, never to return? Not very reasonably. For one thing, if he continued much farther in this present direction towards the bottom of his garden any such visioned escape into the unknown must shortly be arrested by what was, for him, an unscalable wire fence. "Do not be so foolish as to imagine you have no object, however. We warned you, we told you so, but now that in spite of all our pleas you have got yourself into this deplorable--" He recognized the tone of one of his familiars, faint among the other voices as he crashed on through the metamorphoses of dying and reborn hallucinations, like a man who does not know he has been shot from behind. "--condition," the voice went on severely, "you have to do something about it. Therefore we are leading you towards the accomplishment of this something." "I'm not going to drink," the Consul said, halting suddenly. "Or am I? Not mescal anyway." "Of course not, the bottle's just there, behind that bush. Pick it up." "I can't," he objected--"That's right, just take one drink, just the necessary, the therapeutic drink: perhaps two drinks." "G.o.d," the Consul said. "Ah. Good. G.o.d. Christ." "Then you can say it doesn't count." "It doesn't. It isn't mescal." "Of course not, it's tequila. You might have another." "Thanks, I will." The Consul palsiedly readjusted the bottle to his lips. "Bliss. Jesus. Sanctuary... Horror," he added. "--Stop. Put that bottle down, Geoffrey Firmin, what are you doing to yourself?" another voice said in his ear so loudly he turned round. On the path before him a little snake he had thought a twig was rustling off into the bushes and he watched it a moment through his dark gla.s.ses, fascinated. It was a real snake all right. Not that he was much bothered by anything so simple as snakes, he reflected with a degree of pride, gazing straight into the eyes of a dog. It was a pariah dog and disturbingly familiar. "Perro," he repeated, as it still stood there--but had not this incident occurred, was it not now, as it were, occurring an hour or two ago, he thought in a flash. Strange. He dropped the bottle which was of white corrugated gla.s.s--Tequila Anejo de Jalisco, it said on the label--out of sight into the undergrowth, looking about him. All seemed normal again. Anyway, both snake and dog had gone. And the voices had ceased...

The Consul now felt himself in a position to entertain, for a minute, the illusion that all really was "normal." Yvonne would probably be asleep: no point in disturbing her yet. And it was fortunate he'd remembered about the almost full tequila bottle: now he had a chance to straighten up a little, which he never could have done on the porch, before greeting her again. There was altogether too much difficulty involved, under the circ.u.mstances, in drinking on the porch; it was a good thing a man knew where to have a quiet drink when he wanted it, without being disturbed, etc. etc.... All these thoughts were pa.s.sing through his mind--which, so to say, nodding gravely, accepted them with the most complete seriousness--while he gazed back up his garden. Oddly enough, it did not strike him as being nearly so "ruined" as it had earlier appeared. Such chaos as might exist even lent an added charm. He liked the exuberance of the unclipped growth at hand. Whereas farther away, the superb plantains flowering so finally and obscenely, the splendid trumpet vines, brave and stubborn pear trees, the papayas planted around the swimming-pool and beyond, the low white bungalow itself covered by bougainvillea, its long porch like the bridge of a s.h.i.+p, positively made a little vision of order, a vision, however, which inadvertently blended at this moment, as he turned by accident, into a strangely subaqueous view of the plains and the volcanoes with a huge indigo sun mult.i.tudinously blazing south-south-east. Or was it north-north-west? He noted it all without sorrow, even with a certain ecstasy, lighting a cigarette, an Alas (though he repeated the word "Alas!" aloud mechanically), then, the alcohol sweat pouring off his brows like water, he began to walk down the path towards the fence separating his garden from the little new public one beyond that truncated his property.