The Rendezvous and Other Stories Read online

  The captain did not answer, but looked among the papers for the lading of the Trade’s Increase.

  ‘Here it is, sir,’ cried Cornelius, divining the captain’s wish. ‘But we will not need it, except for show,’ he said, with a laugh and a knowing wag of his head. ‘I have put the chief officer’s present on the locker sir, and fifty strings of cash for his men.’

  ‘Present?’ said the captain. His back was to the light, and Cornelius could not tell from his voice whether he was pleased or not by this display of efficient promptitude.

  ‘Yes, sir, a looking-glass, a case of spirits, and one of the boxes of opium, sir, like Mr Swann said.’ He spoke with confidence; he remembered Mr Swann’s words exactly. ‘That should please the black bastard’s heart,’ he said, in imitation of Swann.

  ‘Mr O’Leary,’ said the captain, sharply.

  ‘I ask pardon, sir,’ said Cornelius, going red and drawing the top of his shoe up the calf of his left leg. After a moment he said, ‘I drew up this little paper of the billabillian, sir. It should make us four hundred pieces of eight, give or take a score eitherway.’

  After the briefest hesitation the captain took the paper in silence: as he looked at it he said nothing.

  The awkwardness that had arisen with the captain’s ‘Mr O’Leary’ did not fade away. Cornelius felt it strongly. Had he made the captain’s share large enough? Surely: it was twice what Uncle John had said. He was conscious of the mulatto’s fixed stare: he said, ‘I have counted out the six hundred reals in the two bags under the table.’ Then, feeling that he had to say something more, he added, ‘They are damnation heavy,’ with an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘Mr O’Leary,’ said the captain again, but automatically, without meaning. He had turned a little to the light, and Cornelius could see that his little deep-set eyes were still scrutinizing the slip of paper. Was it not clear? He had set it all down exactly, and had headed it Billabillian, with two lines ruled under it and the date.

  ‘Is the sum taken away rightly, sir?’ he asked, into the continuing silence. A boat rowed by with squeaking oars, and its shadow passed over the ceiling.

  ‘The subtraction is correct,’ said the captain. ‘It is all quite clear.’ He seemed to notice the mulatto for the first time, and pointed silently to the door; the mulatto went out, giving Cornelius a strong, but incomprehensible look as he passed by him.

  ‘Tell me, Mr. O’Leary,’ said the captain in the same toneless, contained voice, ‘how do you spell your names? Write them at the bottom here.’

  He put the paper on the table, and Cornelius, confused and obscurely unhappy, wrote his name below the sum. Cornelius O’Leary.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the captain, sprinkling sand on the signature and folding the paper into the pocket of his black coat.

  ‘May I go ashore when we have finished, sir?’ asked Cornelius, smiling hesitantly, as he looked up into the captain’s strange, withdrawn, inimical face.

  ‘When next thou goes ashore,’ whispered the captain, with a sudden cold ferocity, ‘false thief, it will be –’

  Popery knocked at the door, opened it. Behind him there was a man in a gorgeous sarong. The mulatto stood aside, and said, ‘Billabillian.’

  The Rendezvous

  CLEARLY umbrellas must often blow inside-out (how many times has one not had to tack violently in the turbulence at a street corner, grasping the mast with both hands and just, but only just, succeeding in dipping the rim under the current?) yet all my life I had never seen one. There it lay, a smallish umbrella, neither particularly a man’s nor a woman’s, in the shining, wet-running street, well away from the tumultuous gutter. It was not an old abandoned thrown-away umbrella – everyone has seen them – but a fairly new one: you could tell at first glance that it was malformed in some way, but it was not until you saw the metal ribs sticking through the respectable bright cloth that you understood it had been blown inside-out and that its defeated owner had made an attempt at folding it again before realizing that there was no hope and laying it deliberately in that position, parallel with the street, in nobody’s way, relinquishing it kindly, perhaps with a certain respect.

  One’s eye takes these things in at great speed (I was running at the time), and all the faster if there is any sense of crisis, any amorous excitement or impending catastrophe: afterwards one’s mind has to plod along rationalizing the eye’s instant answer, its explanation of the problematical wreck, the overturned car, the domestic scene in a lit window as the train runs by. The sense of crisis was there, as well as the other factors, for the town was on the edge of disaster. The heavy rains of the last three days had been followed that morning by a stupefying downpour: warm rain hurtling down in drops of far more than natural size and between these drops a fine mist of shattered water. The earth could take up no more and already the river was a great cambered churning ochre mass from bank to bank, tearing furiously at the bridge, and by the Prefecture the orderly canal had drowned its trim brick walls, while the municipal oleanders, their roots ten feet below, jerked their highest leaves, their tallest twigs, among the filth and rubbish on the uneven, breakneck surface. And apart from the general crisis I had my own as I ran splashing past this umbrella. The Paris express would leave (if it were still running) in eight minutes: the station was a quarter of an hour away, and there was not a taxi to be seen anywhere in this flooded town.

  There is something odious, almost unclean, in picking at oneself, slapping labels on to emotions and behaviour – peering through your own keyhole and perhaps at the same time putting on a show for the voyeur. However, there is no doubt a discreditable side to this perpetual missing of trains: and the running, the sweat (and how I sweated under my mackintosh in that steaming heat) only makes it more discreditable still. The cast-iron alibi, even to one’s own court of conscience (but I ran, I ran all the way to catch it), grows less convincing in the hundredth repetition, particularly when it carries on into dreams.

  Sweating and soaked I saw the express pull out and gather momentum as I burst from my last-minute cab. The red lights on the back of the last carriage swung round the curve and vanished – oh familiar nightmare – and I sheltered in the station buffet with its coffee-urns, its silent, frightened waitresses, the thunder of falling rains, sirens, apocalyptic candles in the gloom (the electricity had failed), the deep roar of running water everywhere.

  However, by the time the next train left, the slow train, feeling its way over the flooded plains where only the embankment stood above the water – the vineyards all drowned – I was almost dry: though it was impossible to say the same for my book, or for her letter, or for the bundle of notes, of money (a source of great satisfaction to me) that I had thrust into my pocket for this rendezvous and that had soaked up the water to a surprising if not to a dangerous extent. And by the time I was in Paris the whole sky was blue – not so much as a cloud, not even on the southern rim.

  I had already missed my connection and the essence of the rendezvous, of course: there could be no Cossack hat at the far end of the platform – did she still wear that hat, or had worms fattened on the Persian lamb? – no tall head stretching taller still behind the ticket-collector, no pale-blue eyes looking cold and remote until they flashed into recognition. Should we have shaken hands, kissed? Stood lumpish, undecided, muttering ‘How well you look – not changed in the very least’, each waiting for the other to make the spontaneous unstudied gesture, to define the relationship? Should I have been able to control my voice? That had haunted me ever since I opened her letter.

  So I had missed the essence of the rendezvous; and as for telephoning in London, hearing that mortal ‘ringing tone’ in an empty flat, counting thirteen, counting thirteen again before hanging up, I could do that just as well from Paris. But there was still a train to Dieppe I could catch if I hurried, and at that juncture it seemed to me I ought to go through all the required motions. In that phoney histrionic voice which comes booming out when in fact far deeper real em
otions are there below, I said it was right that I should die by inches in a call-box at Victoria rather than in an archaic booth at Austerlitz – that it should in common respect for her cost me two new pence rather than ten new francs.

  This time I reached the train by racing through the barrier and although two doors would not yield I wrenched the third open and leapt in as the whistles blew and red flags waved. An empty compartment, smelling of dust, with views of Bayeux, Caen, a grisly watering-place, and three graffiti: Couple criminel, vomi par la cite, faiseurs d’orphelins; Je t’aime, Nicole; and Vive moi.

  For the first quarter of an hour or so the railway from Paris to Dieppe perpetually crosses and re-crosses the river: you see it now on the one side and now on the other, and far off through the window a toy Eiffel Tower where you do not always expect it. It was while I was sitting in the carriage that I worked out this piece about the umbrella, its significance (shield, broken, carefully laid aside) and its obvious connection with missing trains; and when at about tea-time we stopped on a blank stretch of line I had little hesitation about getting out. Little hesitation, but still some: the sewing of my right-hand or should I say right-foot shoe, overtaxed by my paddling in it and by its stewing hours of heat in the waiting-room, had started to come undone. It was not so much that the sole had come frankly off, flapping downwards, as that the upper part had begun to rise; yet it seemed to me that by now the relative movement had stopped, and as I had always wanted to see this piece of river close to I opened the door and dropped on to the stones that make the permanent way: rough, pointed stones, flecked with oil and tar, of a kind to be seen nowhere else. It was an odd feeling to lay a hand on the lower edge of the tall train and to know that I was still in touch with it, that I could still become an integral part of it, and that if I chose not to do so it would move off, exit left, gasping and heaving, leaving nothing between this side of the line and the river but transparent air: at the bottom right-hand corner of the carriage, in gold on the brown background, stood the single word Purge.

  The river was exactly as I had hoped it would be. There are so many places that can only be seen from a train – landscapes as absolute as the moon, railway-cuttings filled with cowslips, and grave-eyed badgers pacing there between them. Here was the broad Seine, full but not flood-full, rolling from brim to brim, and on my right, where Purge had been, the long spit of a tree-covered island coming to a point in the middle of the stream. A motor-barge pulling a string of lighters was thrusting up through the current towards the far side of the island, and on the near side a bright blue and red ship with the Belgian flag came floating down. It was a great wide view that I had, though not distressingly large – none of the dehumanizing expanse that you see from an aeroplane: perhaps two miles upstream to where the island merged into the general blur, and somewhat less to a curve that shut off the water in the other direction. Just before this curve I could make out a hard line that I believed to be a weir; and if I was right, then, oh joy, there would be five acres of detergent foam, and swans swimming in the Tide.

  It was all that I could have wished. Warm, still, gentle, luminous air; a mild, veiled sun; the light brighter in some places than in others – Seurat near to, Claude Lorraine farther off. Before I moved the bow-wave of the motor-barge had vanished behind the island and a woman had hung out a line of bright washing on one of those that it towed. Some other vessels had come into sight here and there and not very far from the bank I could now make out the necessary fisherman, his heavy green boat moored against a background of reeds: but although there might be all this light and movement the whole effect was that of a uniform silence. Nothing that moved moved abruptly; there was the gliding continuity of the water and the swimming of the boats, and what human motion there was was small and doll-like in the distance. The angler never stirred.

  I found the old tow-path and began to walk downstream, with the very agreeable sensation of being wafted along, of being part of the general flow. Of course, the sides of the path were somewhat overgrown, but a bare white track ran down the middle of it, and no doubt it would take me as far as Rouen if I let myself go with it long enough.

  The hard line was indeed a weir, a weir that I knew well from the train, and it had its solid park of froth ending in a rounded point from which the current plucked islands and white ribbons, carrying them far down the river, out of sight; but no swans, except for a disappointing grey cygnet on the other side. This was an area I knew intimately well, from having gazed at it out of the windows of another world, but my knowledge was partial, based upon another sense of time and distance, and it did not extend to names. It did not extend to the great works with chimneys and open ironwork towers beyond the stream, either (I must always have looked too fixedly at the weir); but I was not surprised to see it, for there were many such things, vast inhuman enterprises that seemed to work themselves, spread out arbitrarily along this river. The drifting smell persuaded me that it was a chemical works; yet as far as I could see the world was unaffected by it. The chimneys bore their plumes of smoke, the unnatural reek came across the air; yet the river flowed and the trees stood up round and green, as though the two entities were entirely independent of one another. How different this will be, I said with a little skip, when I come to the burning fields.

  But they were far away. First I had to follow the Seine round a noble bend that curved back on itself in a more than S, and this took me upwards of an hour: an S that the train annihilated by drawing a dollar stroke across it at eighty miles an hour. Dutch barges in the middle, with their flags; a very long low vessel with its body awash and a ridiculous wooden house perched up on one end – French; another Belgian, riding high with its screw churning white; yet not a sound did I hear until the very tail of the S, when a magpie flew from a bush on the left and trailed far out over the river, cackling as it went. Until then there might have been a deafness on the world.

  Now for the first time plain agricultural land came down on the river on my side of it. Fields, divided by post and wire; leys; a fair amount of stubble, some of it already ploughed; neat heaps of dung; no people – just the fields and in one of them an empty cart. Another turn: meadows with lapwings calling over them, and along the river-bank (propped by piles, black baulks of timber, at this point where it was so deep) the tall dipping gallows of a row of fish-traps, archaic things like lateen masts, some with their baskets hoisted up, others dipping attentively. Beyond them lay an empty ferry-boat, moored to a wavering pier; and here a road came down to the river, a cart-track from a village or from the small collection of farms whose dark outbuildings I could make out behind a line of trees. Another mile, with an easy path under my feet; a few boats, and nothing else moving in the world except for one moorhen that jerked its neck among the reeds.

  Now I was coming closer to my Sodom: already there were some sickly willows on the bank, by no means as sweet a green as those on the farther side, and a far greater profusion of the rank yellow weed called Stinking Willy. A train went by on the other bank, running at full stretch for Paris, and it gave me a pleasant feeling of being both here and there – a feeling slightly marred however by a lingering impression of guilt that I did not choose to identify at that moment; the association of trains and morose delectation, no doubt. The vegetation was thinning out; even the harsher kinds of grass had a stunted, lightless, sullen look; the naked earth showed more and more, a damp, soured desert; and here at last was my burning field. A great long rectangle, perfectly neat, perfectly level; and it was all made up of a black, coke-like substance, lying there in unspeakable profusion and emitting trails of smoke, yellow rising fumaroles, small pink flames here and there, and sometimes, where the smoke was darkest, a dusky crimson glow. No wire round it, no fence. No warnings: apparently no road. I had always wanted to smell it, and now, since the movement of the air was against me, I eagerly climbed from the towpath to the first black crunching scoriae. I could not stalk about on it as I had promised myself, because my gaping s
hoe would let in some furious spark; but I did take a few triumphant paces, and immediately the heat rose up through my soles.

  Bare earth with a sulphurous efflorescence came next, then sparse foul shrubs, twitch, and rose-bay willow-herb in seed. Gradually the trees improved – taller, more sprightly. Almost all traces of my burning field had gone by the time I came to these allotments late in the day, these oblongs of kitchen-garden huddled together, speckled with tool-sheds made of old shutters, railway sleepers and metal advertisements; a scene that could only be explained by the presence of some industrial village hidden behind the rising land.

  And now there were figures in the landscape, a group of youths clustered strangely behind one of the little sheds. They were near enough for me to see the black leather jackets, the big shining buckles, the unmistakable hair, the thickness of the frontal bone, the deep unluminous skin, and the shot-gun that the tallest had in his hands. They broke up on seeing me, some running, all moving rapidly away from the bothie; then they slowed to an exaggeratedly casual film-cowboy stride, with many an evil look backwards. In the first moment the group – they had certainly been breaking into the shed – had lost much of its cohesion, but by the time they had passed through the remaining allotments they had regained it, and with it all their bold inhumanity. Their direction, as far as they had any direction, was down the river, and for some minutes we all walked slowly towards Rouen. Slowly, because that was their pace; and slowly, because I had no wish to catch them up.

  The river was beginning one of its smooth splendid curves again, bearing away to the left, and this bend enclosed a vast half-moon of marshy land, intersected by palely shining ditches and a much larger reed-lined canal. ‘I shall cut across the bend,’ I said, ‘for although there is nothing against stepping out and passing through the midst of them, I do not choose to do so.’ All lies, all lies, of course; there was everything against walking through the midst of them, for we were not indifferent; a relationship had already been established, and its rays were darting to and fro – fear, dislike and contempt on my side, and malignance, revolt and bloody dissatisfaction on theirs.