Under the Volcano

I-6

—But the Consul also was not a coward, M. Laruelle had interrupted, perhaps irrelevantly, at least not the kind to be craven about his life. On the contrary he was an extremely brave man, no less than a hero in fact, who had won, for conspicuous gallantry in the service of his country during the last war, a coveted medal. Nor with all his faults was he at bottom a vicious man. Without knowing quite why M. Laruelle felt he might have actually proved a great force for good. But Sr. Bustamente had never said he was a coward. Almost reverently Sr. Bustamente pointed out that being a coward and afraid for one’s life were two different things in Mexico. And certainly the Consul was not vicious but an hombre noble. Yet might not just such a character and distinguished record as M. Laruelle claimed was his have precisely qualified him for the excessively dangerous activities of a spider? It seemed useless to try and explain to Sr. Bustamente that the poor Consul’s job was merely a retreat, that while he had intended originally to enter the Indian Civil Service, he had in fact entered the Diplomatic Service only for one reason and another to be kicked downstairs into ever remoter consulships, and finally into the sinecure in Quauhnahuac as a position where he was least likely to prove a nuisance to the Empire, in which with one part of his mind at least, M. Laruelle suspected, he so passionately believed.

But why had all this happened? he asked himself now. Quién sabe? He risked another anís, and at the first sip a scene, probably rather inaccurate (M. Laruelle had been in the artillery during the last war, survived by him in spite of Guillaume Apollinaire’s being for a time his commanding officer), was conjured to his mind. A dead calm on the line, but the S.S. Samaritan, if she should have been on the line, was actually far north of it. Indeed for a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram she had for some time been steering a rather odd course. Why, for instance, had she emerged into the Pacific Ocean out of the Bungo Strait in Japan south of Shikoku and not from the East China Sea? For days now, not unlike a stray sheep on the immeasurable green meadows of waters, she had been keeping an offing from various interesting islands far out of her path. Lot’s Wife and Arzobispo. Rosario and Sulphur Island. Volcano Island and St. Augustine. It was somewhere between Guy Rock and the Euphrosyne Reef that she first sighted the periscope and sent her engines full speed astern. But when the submarine surfaced she hove to. An unarmed merchantman, the Samaritan put up no fight. Before the boarding party from the submarine reached her, however, she suddenly changed her temper. As if by magic the sheep turned to a dragon belching fire. The U-boat did not even have time to dive. Her entire crew was captured. The Samaritan, who had lost her captain in the engagement, sailed on, leaving the submarine burning helplessly, a smoking cigar aglow on the vast surface of the Pacific.

And in some capacity obscure to M. Laruelle—for Geoffrey had not been in the merchant service but, arrived via the yacht club and something in salvage, a naval lieutenant, or God knows perhaps by that time a lieutenant-commander—the Consul had been largely responsible for this escapade. And for it, or gallantry connected with it, he had received the British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.

But there was a slight hitch apparently. For whereas the submarine’s crew became prisoners of war when the Samaritan (which was only one of the ship’s names, albeit that the Consul liked best) reached port, mysteriously none of her officers were among them. Something had happened to those German officers, and what had happened was not pretty. They had, it was said, been kidnapped by the Samaritan’s stokers and burned alive in the furnaces.

M. Laruelle thought of this. The Consul loved England and as a young man may have subscribed—though it was doubtful, this being rather more in those days the prerogative of noncombatants—to the popular hatred of the enemy. But he was a man of honour and probably no one supposed for a moment he had ordered the Samaritan’s stokers to put the Germans in the furnace. None dreamed that such an order given would have been obeyed. But the fact remained the Germans had been put there and it was no use saying that was the best place for them. Someone must take the blame.

So the Consul had not received his decoration without first being court-martialed. He was acquitted. It was not at all clear to M. Laruelle why he and no one else should have been tried. Yet it was easy to think of the Consul as a kind of more lachrymose pseudo “Lord Jim” living in a self-imposed exile, brooding, despite his award, over his lost honour, his secret, and imagining that a stigma would cling to him because of it throughout his whole life. Yet this was far from the case. No stigma clung to him evidently. And he had shown no reluctance in discussing the incident with M. Laruelle, who years before had read a guarded article concerning it in the Paris-Soir. He had even been enormously funny about it. “People simply did not go round,” he said, “putting Germans in furnaces.” It was only once or twice during those later months when drunk that to M. Laruelle’s astonishment he suddenly began proclaiming not only his guilt in the matter but that he’d always suffered horribly on account of it. He went much further. No blame attached to the stokers. No question arose of any order given them. Flexing his muscles he sardonically announced the single-handed accomplishment himself of the deed. But by this time the poor Consul had already lost almost all capacity for telling the truth and his life had become a quixotic oral fiction. Unlike “Jim” he had grown rather careless of his honour and the German officers were merely an excuse to buy another bottle of mescal. M. Laruelle told the Consul as much, and they quarrelled grotesquely, becoming estranged again—when bitterer things had not estranged them—and remained so till the last—indeed at the very last it had been wickedly, sorrowfully worse than ever—as years before at Leasowe.

Then will I headlong fly into the earth:

Earth, gape! it will not harbour me!

M. Laruelle had opened the book of Elizabethan plays at random and for a moment he sat oblivious of his surroundings, gazing at the words that seemed to have the power of carrying his own mind downward into a gulf, as in fulfilment on his own spirit of the threat Marlowe’s Faustus had cast at his despair. Only Faustus had not said quite that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said: “Then will I headlong run into the earth,” and “O, no, it will not—” That was not so bad. Under the circumstances to run was not so bad as to fly. Intaglioed in the maroon leather cover of the book was a golden faceless figurine also running, carrying a torch like the elongated neck and head and open beak of the sacred ibis. M. Laruelle sighed, ashamed of himself. What had produced the illusion, the elusive flickering candlelight, coupled with the dim, though now less dim, electric light, or some correspondence, maybe, as Geoff liked to put it, between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious? How the Consul had delighted in the absurd game too: sortes Shakespeareanae . . . And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness. Enter Wagner, solus. . . . Ick sal you wat suggen, Hans. Dis skip, dat comen from Candy, is als vol, by God’s sacrement, van sugar, almonds, cambrick, end alle dingen, towsand, towsand ding. M. Laruelle closed the book on Dekker’s comedy, then, in the face of the barman who was watching him, stained dishcloth over his arm, with quiet amazement, shut his eyes, and opening the book again twirled one finger in the air, and brought it down firmly upon a passage he now held up to the light:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough,

That sometime grew within this learnèd man,

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall—

Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table, closing it with the fingers and thumb of one hand, while with the other hand he reached to the floor for a folded sheet of paper that had fluttered out of it. He picked the paper up between two fingers and unfolded it, turning it over. Hotel Bella Vista, he read. There were really two sheets of uncommonly thin hotel notepaper that had been pressed flat in the book, long but narrow and crammed on both sides with marginless writing in pencil. At first glance it did not appear a letter. But there was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word, the words themselves slanting steeply downhill, though the individual characters seemed as if resisting the descent, braced, climbing the other way. M. Laruelle felt a qualm. For he saw now that it was indeed a letter of sorts, though one that the writer undoubtedly had little intention, possibly no capability for the further tactile effort, of posting:

. . . . . . Night: and once again, the nightly grapple with death, the room shaking with daemonic orchestras, the snatches of fearful sleep, the voices outside the window, my name being continually repeated with scorn by imaginary parties arriving, the dark’s spinets. As if there were not enough real noises in these nights the color of grey hair. Not like the rending tumult of American cities, the noise of the unbandaging of great giants in agony. But the howling pariah dogs, the c***s that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico. For myself I like to take my sorrow into the shadow of old monasteries, my guilt into cloisters and under tapestries, and into the misericordes of unimaginable cantinas where sad-faced potters and legless beggars drink at dawn, whose cold jonquil beauty one rediscovers in death. So that when you left, Yvonne, I went to Oaxaca. There is no sadder word. Shall I tell you, Yvonne, of the terrible journey there through the desert over the narrow-gauge railway on the rack of a third-class carriage bench, the child whose life its mother and I saved by rubbing its belly with tequila out of my bottle, or of how, when I went to my room in the hotel where we once were happy, the noise of slaughtering below in the kitchen drove me out into the glare of the street, and later, that night, there was a vulture sitting in the washbasin? Horrors portioned to a giant nerve! No, my secrets are of the grave and must be kept. And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell.

It is not Mexico of course but in the heart. And to-day I was in Quauhnahuac as usual when I received from my lawyer news of our divorce. This was as I invited it. I received other news too: England is breaking off diplomatic relations with Mexico and all her Consuls—those, that is, who are English—are being called home. These are kindly and good men, for the most part, whose name I suppose I demean. I shall not go home with them. I shall perhaps go home but not to England, not to that home. So, at midnight, I drove in the Plymouth to Tomalín to see my Tlaxcaltecan friend Cervantes the cockfighter at the Salón Ofélia. And thence I came to the Farolito in Parián where I sit now in a little room off the bar at four-thirty in the morning drinking ochas and then mescal and writing this on some Bella Vista notepaper I filched the other night, perhaps because the writing paper at the Consulate, which is a tomb, hurts me to look at. I think I know a good deal about physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying. I wonder if it is because to-night my soul has really died that I feel at the moment something like peace.