“Well, well,” said Byrne quietly, “I think I find your experiences rather more interesting than your philosophy. Tell me, if you like, about where you’ve been.”
“WHAT I’ve been might surprise you more. I’ve had jobs as a waiter, a ship’s steward, an air-mechanic, a translator of English books into Russian for the Soviet Government, and a commercial traveller. Oh, and an inventor. I MUST tell you about that. It’s rather funny, and—incidentally—it explains how I ever managed to arrive in Hollywood.”
Byrne seemed amused by the story, especially by the description of the gyrector experiment in England. “I give you good marks for pluck, anyhow,” he commented, and then, with a suddenness that was characteristic of him, took up a book and would talk no more.
They had many such conversations and arguments, which Nicky enjoyed the more completely because Byrne’s replies were rarely of a kind that interrupted the copious torrent of his own confessions. Once, after he had been chattering for some time, and had paused at a point that invited some remark from the other, Byrne looked up quietly and exclaimed: “I’m sorry, but I was thinking of something else for the moment—you’ll have to go over that again, I’m afraid, if you want me to grasp it.”
“But I really don’t think I could possibly remember it all.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t matter then.”
Nicky laughed. “Of course it doesn’t. Nothing matters that I say— sparks from fused wires, that’s all. Much more interesting is what you were thinking about that monopolised all your attention.”
Byrne answered, as almost from a dream: “I was thinking of some work that awaits me. When I get to Buenos Aires I have a three-weeks’ journey up-river to the frayed edges of civilisation and beyond. Yet only two centuries ago, in that same region, my predecessors were carrying out what was perhaps, all things considered, the most successful social experiment in history. In those days cathedral bells rang out over rich provinces, the native Indians lived in cosy homesteads and their children went to school and were taught Spanish—a whole nation enjoyed peace and good-humour under the rule of a few wise and elderly men in black uniforms—the same, by the way, that I wear at this moment. History tells us, too, that the art of music throve especially, and that violins were brought over from Europe to be played in the churches instead of organs. I often try to think what that must have meant. Mid-eighteenth century, remember—too early for Mozart, but there would be Bach and Corelli. Entrancing picture, isn’t it? Most people think of civilisation as something that goes on spreading inevitably—but it’s really much more like a tide that can ebb as well as flow. That land where once there were Calderon plays and Bach sonatas is now a fever-ridden waste inhabited by a few half-barbarous tribes, while the old cathedrals, stripped of their bells and ornaments, are almost hidden away. More terribly than Debussy’s, too, because their sea is a green one.”
“And that’s where you’re going?”
“Yes. I understand that the grand tradition still partly lingers, mixed up with the older and younger traditions of poisoned arrows and gin. A friend of mine, a brother-priest, was there a few years ago and found the natives very glad to have their baptisms and marriages and burials re- solemnised by him. He couldn’t stay, unfortunately.”
“But YOU’LL stay?”
“I hope so.”
That was the day before the Megantic turned into the grey estuary of the Plate. The next morning, with Buenos Aires in sight, Nicky sought out Byrne for what must necessarily be their last talk on board. “Where do you go when you get on shore?” he asked.
“To Rosario by train, and then by river-boat to Asuncion. It leaves to-morrow.”
“And then?”
“I have still another thousand miles or so after that.”
“Can I—may I come with you?”
“Good heavens, no—it would be the poorest sort of rest- cure imaginable.”
“I don’t want a rest-cure, except from crowds and women and cities.” With sudden emotion in his voice, Nicky added: “I shall be unhappy when you’ve gone. I’d like to see those lost cathedrals. And if you won’t have me, I can’t think of anything else to do. Buenos Aires is just another place where I’d be found out and fęted within a week…. You don’t really mind if I come with you, do you?”
Byrne answered, after a long pause: “I suppose I can’t physically prevent you, but I strongly advise you not to come. You’ll find it a tedious, hot, and probably unpleasant journey leading in the end to nowhere that you may think at all thrilling.”
“But I want to come.”
“You’ll certainly want to go back as soon as you get there.”
“Well, even so, I’d still want to come.”
“Then there’s no stopping you, evidently.” He smiled and added: “For my part, of course, I shall be pleased to have your company.”
They went ashore together and spent the rest of the day in necessary preparations. Most of Nicky’s luggage was unsuitable for such a trip, and he had to make many purchases, among them being a revolver.
Next day they began the journey upstream in the small white-funnelled steamer of the Argentine Navigation Company. Nicky was possessed by a deep tranquillity of mind that he could hardly account for; there was nothing much to see, and still less to do, yet the slowly unwinding panorama of grey water and green shore gave him a sense of having found at last some fragment of what, without knowing it, he had all along been seeking. Byrne was happy also, but with a more definite eagerness for the future; they talked a good deal during the warm, lazy hours, uneventful save for an occasional passing of villages and tobacco-plantations, or the glimpse of alligators basking in the shallows. The nights were less pleasant, with swarms of flies and mosquitoes that clustered about the electric globes; but the mornings, misty and delicate, were lovely preludes to the long, leisurely days. As the miles unfolded northward changes, imperceptible at first, became definitely noticeable; the narrowing of the river till it no longer seemed an endless lake, and the gradual merge of climate and scenery from temperate to sub-tropical. But there was something else less easy to define—an atmosphere of deepening mystery suggested sometimes by a high tree visible in the distance, or a curving sun- hazy tributary wandering in from left or right. The sky at midday was more brazen; the vegetation thickened and paddled its roots more confidently into the stream; and the hot winds from the north came freighted with a curious flavour, subtle and even pleasing, yet less so if one were alone or had too much of it—a hint of the vast crepuscular decay of the forests. Nor was it nature only that supplied the faintly sinister undertone, for soon the ship entered Paraguayan waters, and there could be seen the scarcely inhabited levels of that inland republic, with here and there, even after sixty years, reminders of a tragedy to which the history of no European nation affords a parallel—a madman’s war that killed more than half the entire population. The sun-blistered ruin of the church at Humaěta seemed a fitting symbol of bloodshed almost pathologically hideous.
Soon, however, such darker memories were quenched in the idle charm of Asunçion. Here it was necessary to change vessels, and as the one proceeding farther upstream did not depart for a couple of days, Nicky and Byrne had a chance to explore the tree-shaded avenues and lounge in the open- air cafés. Nicky enjoyed this last taste of elegance; there was little that was ugly or blatant in the colourful, indolent civilisation. Even amongst shops and electric trams, there was a feeling of immensities near by, and at evening, in the cool patios, a certain wistfulness was imaginable, as of a city that remembered the Conquistadores.
Seventeen days later, amidst the dusk of a thunderstorm that refused to break, Nicky and Byrne stepped off the launch that had brought them to Maramba.
This Maramba, far from any railhead, and the end of river-navigability for anything larger than a canoe, was the point at which they must take to the land. It was scarcely a pleasant place. It represented, as Byrne had said, the frayed edges of civilisation, and also the e
qually frayed edges of barbarism; but the meeting was disappointingly unpicturesque. The town looked, as indeed it was, an outpost of an army that had partly given up the fight. A few clustered buildings rose up from the river-bank, and beyond them, on the higher levels, various constructions of timber and corrugated iron littered the scene as far as the dark semi-circle of jungle. The entire settlement could hardly have been posed more effectively as a symbol of defeat. Grass pushed between the cobbles of the quays; the stucco peeled off the houses in ochreous strips; and, to clinch the impression, a clearing beyond the town was heaped with rusting machinery, festooned already by undergrowth—excavators and tip-waggons and a crane that upheaved above the jungle grass like some menacingly poised snake.
But most evident of all to the few arrivals by the launch that afternoon was the heat. It was not ordinary heat. Nicky had been in India and the Red Sea without an experience of anything approaching it. It was a heat that seemed to have size and weight, to lean on the air like something actual and fleshly. The sky billowed with thunder-clouds, but the heat poured through them and met a deeper, angrier heat that rose like an emanation out of the earth itself.
Even the proprietor of the single scorched hotel admitted that the weather was exceptional. He was a chocolate-eyed, dark-skinned Brazilian, who served them with beer on a sizzling verandah and showed amazement at their projected journey. Apparently the route had not been traversed for some years, and they must expect stretches of practically unexplored jungle, as well as casual encounters with jaguars, anacondas, and hostile Indians. All of which might have been perfectly well known to Byrne, judging by the way he received the information. After the man had gone, he said to Nicky: “Well, I didn’t exaggerate the unpleasantness of the trip, did I?”
But Nicky only smiled, and the smile returned him by the older man was a complete settlement of the matter. Throughout the long and less comfortable journey from Asunçion, their intimacy had ripened; they had talked less, but had reached deeper and more silent stages of friendship. Nicky’s happiness had grown to be of a kind that discomfort hardly affected; he who in New York had been at the mercy of trivial annoyances, found that here, in this dark-hearted country, physical irritations, such as heat and mosquito-bites, were endurable by the body without clamouring to the brain for rage. And this, in some strange and hidden way, was due to Byrne. The man tranquillised his mind as women had sometimes tranquillised his body—lent him deep reserves of security from some secret store. They never talked religion, nor did Byrne’s attitude ever exceed the supposition that Nicky was a mere adventuring tourist, seeking new thrills which he must take the risk of not finding. Yet they found much in common, even on such a basis. Both had courage, Nicky of a sharp, excitable kind, and Byrne more implacably; they had shown this on an occasion during the river journey, when a piranha, freshly caught, had flapped about on deck. Nicky, with no experience of the small but madly voracious freshwater-fish, had not troubled to keep out of its way, and the tearing teeth had closed into his arm as he stooped over it. Byrne, ordering him to keep perfectly still, had then, with calm dexterity, pulled the jaws apart at the risk of having fingers bitten off. Afterwards they had laughed over the incident, but it had revealed to both of them a quality in each other which reassured.
Nicky even contrived to be happy during that first sweltering evening at Maramba. It was likely to take a few days to make arrangements for continuing the journey on land, and the prospect of waiting in such a place was not outwardly pleasing. The hotel was dirty; the bedrooms reeked of stale, oily distillations; the food was bad; the mosquitoes proved to be of some new and fiercer variety; and over it all, scarcely less oppressive when night had fallen, was the heat. Yet the storm did not break. Mutterings could sometimes be heard in the distance, and the trees stirred fitfully in gusts of wind that were hotter than the stillness; there was a heavy smell in the air, that smell of rotting vegetation with which Nicky had already grown familiar, but here stiffened and coagulated. Another smell pervaded it intermittently, that of some faintly aromatic furnace; Nicky thought of forest-fires, but Byrne said that the forests were uncombustible—that, in fact, being the great obstacle to colonisation. Suddenly, while they were talking in the hotel lobby, an extra whiff lent identity to the odour—it was like burning coffee, Nicky decided. Later the proprietor told them that that was exactly what it was—coffee being destroyed on the plantations because there was no market for it. He gave them also a long account of other local calamities—of the English concessionaires who had hoped to obtain manganese and had left all their machinery behind after a year of fruitless operations, of tobacco-plantations abandoned by Jap settlers—and that, he indicated, with an expressive shrug, was anywhere the last stigma of hopelessness. No, there was nothing in Maramba in these days. It had been different during the rubber boom, which he could remember as a boy—those golden years when the trickle of wealth had poured over the Matto Grasso from the Xingu and the Tapajoz. But now there was nothing, except the declining river-trade and the small activities dependent upon the frontier garrison. As for this cursed weather, he had been in Maramba for twenty-five years, and did not think he could remember anything to equal it.
Before turning in, Nicky strolled with Byrne about the streets, deserted and eerily brilliant in the almost continuous sheet-lightning. They stood on the quays by the shabby-magnificent customs-house and stared at the low line of jungle across the river— sinister even in the theatrical glare of the flashes. Once they saw a tarantula scampering, if that were the word, over some timber-stacks, its dark, leathery body compact of evil liveliness. Nicky was excited and wanted to approach the monster, but Byrne would not let him. “There are some things best kept out of one’s mind as long as possible,” he said, with a close arm-grip. The thrill had set them both sweating heavily, and just at that moment, over the flat roofs, came the sound of a woman’s shriek. Instantly, a rain of other sounds scattered after it—cries of birds, voices in the distance, the bang of a sharply closed door. Then silence again. “This is really a rather dreadful place,” said Nicky, a little hysterically. “Everything feels as if it’s waiting for something to happen.”
“It will be better after the storm,” Byrne answered.
After a short saunter they reached the hotel again. They slept badly; the mosquitoes were troublesome, and Nicky imagined tarantulas in the room—perhaps it had been wise, after all, to have missed seeing the brute at closer quarters. The hours crawled through to morning, but the usual chill before dawn did not come, nor was the storm any nearer breaking. Indeed, the clouds seemed to have dissolved in readiness for the daylight, leaving behind them a thick steamy haze through which the sun shone as through soiled muslin. Even at breakfast it was far hotter than at any time during the previous day.
As they lingered over cups of maté, they were visited by the customs-officer, a heavy-jowled, slouching fellow in a sweat-sodden uniform. He knew no English, and Byrne and he conversed in a stilted mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. There was a hitch at first owing to the fact that Nicky had grown a beard that did not appear in his passport photograph, but this was eventually explained, and with many bowings and clinkings of glasses the man became quite cordial. Byrne questioned him about porterage, and received, after expressions of astonishment at the proposed journey, a promise to have ready a few likely applicants, if he would call at the customs-house later in the morning. Byrne said he would, which was the signal for further civilities and bottles of lukewarm beer. As the officer left, he said something with great vehemence which Byrne afterwards, with a smile, translated as: “He says he thinks it’s going to be a rather hot day.”
They wilted back into chairs in the shuttered hotel parlour and tried to ignore the glare that burst through the slats. It was easier not to move; the mere exchange of words and sentences evoked fresh streams of perspiration from every pore; and the thought of the customs-officer crossing those blazing pavements to the quay-side was oppressive even to the inward
eye that pictured the scene. There were no sounds of life in the hotel, or in the street outside, or in the whole town, for that matter. Yet, beneath the still and utterly silent surface, there was a sense of brooding, of life that was not extinct, but drugged into unconsciousness between the answering heats of earth and sky. Byrne read a book, but Nicky preferred to sit motionlessly pondering. How curious, it might be thought, that anyone in his right mind should deliberately leave civilised luxury for a place like this! It was madness, perhaps, and if so, it must be a greater madness for him to be eager, as he was, to push on, deeper and farther into this merciless country, with Byrne. He was puzzled to decide what it was that chiefly attracted him in the man—it must be more, he thought, than his half-reluctant friendliness and calm intelligence. A kind of sureness, perhaps, that he had—sureness of background, of being in a tradition, something that made Nicky feel that he himself was not so much sharing an adventure with a man as marching with an army on a crusade.
Towards midday Byrne said he must go over and see the customs-officer, as he had promised; but he insisted on going alone. Nicky was by no means anxious to face the heat, yet as soon as Byrne had gone he wished desperately that he had gone with him. He felt suddenly afraid, with a renewal of perception that all was not lifeless as it seemed. He sat for a few moments, found he could no longer endure the waiting, and then strolled into the hotel lobby. He was shivering slightly, and wondered if he were falling ill; the hall-floor, as well as his legs, appeared to quiver as he approached the street. Seen from inside, the doorway was a slab of yellow, sickly to the eye; but as soon as he entered the glare he felt a new and more fearful nausea, for the sky above the opposite roofs was no longer even white, but an angry, opaque carnelian.