Good heavens, I said.
I can prove it, Henry. Look here. He opened his notebook and showed me a page. His writing went something like this:
1
Forgot to time (разг.) Забыл отметить время
He said, Youve only got to multiply by seven. That makes half an hour a week. Twenty-six hours a year. Of course shipboard life isnt quite average. Theres more drinking between meals. And beer keeps on repeating. Look at this time here one minute, fifty-five seconds. Thats more than the average, but then Ive noted down two gins. Theres a lot of variations too I havent accounted for[247], and from now on Im going to make a note of the temperature too. Heres July twenty-fifth six minutes, nine seconds n.c. that stands for not complete. I went out to dinner in BA and left my notebook at home. And heres July twenty-seventh only three minutes twelve seconds in all, but, if you remember, there was a very cold north wind on July twenty-fifth and I went out to dinner without an overcoat.
Are you drawing any conclusions? I asked.
Thats not my job, he said. Im no expert. I just report the facts and any data like the gins and the weather that seem to have a bearing[248]. Its for others to draw the conclusions.
Who are the others?
Well, I thought when I had completed six months research Id get in touch with a urinary specialist. You dont know what he mightnt be able to read into these figures. Those guys deal all the time with the sick. Its important to them to know what happens in the case of an average fellow.
And you are the average fellow?
Yes. Im a hundred per cent healthy, Henry. I have to be in my job. They give me the works every so often.
The CIA? I asked.
Youre kidding, Henry. You cant believe that crazy girl.
He fell into a sad silence as he thought of her, leaning forward with his chin in his hand. An island with the appearance of a gigantic alligator floated downstream with its snout extending along the water. Pale green fishing boats drifted downstream faster than our engines could drive us against the current they passed rapidly like little racing cars. Each fisherman was surrounded by floating blocks of wood to which his lines were attached. Rivers branched off into the grey misty interior, wider than the Thames at Westminster but going nowhere at all.
He asked, And she really called herself Tooley?
Yes, Tooley.
I guess she must think of me sometimes? he said with a sort of questioning hope.
Chapter 3
It was two days later that we came to Formosa, on a day which was as humid as all the others had been. The heat broke on the cheek like little bubbles of water. We had turned off the great Parana river the night before near Corrientes, and now we were on the Paraguay. Fifty yards across the water from the Argentinian Formosa the other country lay, sodden and empty. The import-export man went ashore in his dark city suit carrying a new suitcase. He went with rapid steps, looking at his watch like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. It certainly seemed an ideal town for smugglers, with only a river to cross. In Paraguay I could see only a crumbling hut, a pig and a small girl.
I was tired of walking the deck, so I went ashore too. It was a Sunday and quite a crowd had collected to see the boat come in. There was a pervading smell of orange petals, but it was the only sweet thing about Formosa. One long avenue was lined with oranges and trees bearing rose-coloured flowers, which I learnt later to be lapachos. The side streets petered out a few yards away into a niggardly wild nature of mud and scrub. Everything to do with government, business, justice or amusement lay in the one avenue: a tourist hotel of grey cement on the waters edge had been half-built, for what tourists? little shops selling Coca-Cola; a cinema which advertised an Italian Western; two hairdressers; a garage with one wrecked car; a cantina. The only house of more than one story was the hotel, and the only old and beautiful building in the long avenue proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison. There were fountains all down the avenue but they didnt play.
The avenue must lead me somewhere, I thought, but I was wrong. I passed the bust of a bearded man called Urquiza, who, judging from the carved inscription, must have had something to do with liberation from what? and ahead of me I saw rise up above the orange trees and the lapachos a marble man upon, a marble horse who was certainly General San Martín Buenos Aires had made me familiar with his features and I had seen him upon the seafront at Boulogne too. The statue closed the avenue as the Arc de Triomphe closes the Champs-Elysées; I expected some further avenue beyond, but when I reached the statue I found the hero sat on his horse in a waste of mud at the farthest limit of the town. No strollers came so far, and the road went no farther. Only a starving dog, like a skeleton from the Natural History Museum[249], picked his way timorously across the dirt and the rain pools towards me and San Martín. I began to walk back.
If I describe this ignoble little town in such detail, it is because it was the scene of a long dialogue I held with myself which was interrupted only by a surprising encounter. I had begun, as I passed the first hairdresser, to think of Miss Keene and her letter of shy appeal which surely deserved a better response than my brief telegram, and then in this humid place, where the only serious business or entertainment was certainly crime, and even the national bank had to be defended on a Sunday afternoon by a guard with an automatic rifle, I thought of my home in Southwood, of my garden, of Major Charge trumpeting across the fence, and of the sweet sound of the bells from Church Road. But I remembered Southwood now with a kind of friendly tolerance as the place which Miss Keene should never have left, the place where Miss Keene was happy, the place where I myself no longer belonged. It was as though I had escaped from an open prison, had been snatched away, provided with a rope ladder and a waiting car, into my aunts world, the world of the unexpected character and the unforeseen event. There the rabbit-faced smuggler was at home, the Czech with his two million plastic straws, and poor OToole busy making a record of his urine.
I passed the end of a street called Rua Dean Furnes which petered away like all the others into no-mans-land, and I stayed a moment outside the governors house, which was painted with a pink wash. On the veranda were two unoccupied chaises-longues[250] and the windows were wide open on an empty room with a portrait of a military man, the President, I suppose, and a row of empty chairs lined up against the wall like a firing squad. The sentry made a small movement with his automatic rifle and I moved on towards the national bank, where another sentry made the same warning movement when I paused.
That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworths great ode in Palgraves Golden Treasury. Palgrave, like Scott, carried signs of my fathers reading in the form of dog-eared pages, and knowing so little about him, I had followed every clue and so learned to enjoy what he had enjoyed. Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworths terms as a prison-house what was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage? Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.
Ones life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand[251]. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my fathers library had not contained the right books. (I dont think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)
I can remember very little of the vision preceding the prison-house: it must have faded very early into the light of common day, but it seemed to me, as I put Palgrave down beside my bunk and thought of my aunt, that she for one had never allowed the vision to fade. Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality. I had been born as a result of what my stepmother would have called an immoral act, an act of darkness. I had begun in immoral freedom. Why then should I have found myself in a prison-house? My real mother had certainly not been imprisoned anywhere.
Its too late now, I said to Miss Keene, signalling to me desperately from Koffiefontein, Im no longer there, where you think I am. Perhaps we might have comforted ourselves once and been content in our prison cell, but Im not the same man you regarded with a touch of tenderness over the tatting. I have escaped. I dont resemble whatever identikit portrait you have of me. I walked back towards the landing stage, and looking behind me, I saw the canine skeleton on my tracks. I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope.
Hi, man, a voice called. You in number-one hurry?[252] and Wordsworth was suddenly there a few yards away. He had risen from a bench beside the bust of the liberator Urquiza and advanced towards me with both hands out and his face slashed open with the wide wound of his grin. Man, you not forget old Wordsworth? he asked, wringing both my hands, and laughing so loudly and deeply that he sprayed my face with his happiness.
Why, Wordsworth, I said with equal pleasure, what on earth are you doing here?
My lil bebi gel, he said, she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr. Pullen come.
I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.
Why, Wordsworth, I said with equal pleasure, what on earth are you doing here?
My lil bebi gel, he said, she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr. Pullen come.
I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.