Mr. Fortune (25 page)

It was not happiness, and he would have turned from the thought that it might be consolation. It was no substitute for what he had lost. But it was something found. It was, indeed, the right place to be unhappy in. And that it should be so was a confirmation of a long-carried hope.

More than a year ago he had landed at Valparaiso, his first coming to South America. The liner had docked soon after dusk, but his work as purser's clerk had kept him on board all night and most of the following day. It was late in the afternoon when he went on shore, alone and inadequately, teased by a ridiculous sensation that he must have come to the wrong place, since no one else was doing as he did. It was not possible to feel with proper interest that he was now setting foot on a strange continent, and it seemed to him that South America was but another place he would have to get away from—a junction where the trains did not fit, and where the waiting-room needed airing. He could almost smell the stifling fustiness of the coke fire, and the posters on the hoardings seemed to be the usual recommendations to young girls, only they happened to be in Spanish, and, very sensibly, illustrated. Perhaps the train would be late, perhaps he would have to wait some time before he got away; for his job on the liner was at an end, he had been taken on for the voyage only, replacing a clerk who had died of influenza. However, something would turn up, and he would catch it, and shog on.

So temporary did his sojourn appear to him that he forgot his intention of finding a cheap hotel, and went for a walk to kill time, noticing the details of his route only that he might be able to find his way back. Then he struck a line of trams, and followed that. They banged past him, shaking the hot air off their flanks, and the names on their destination boards were so romantically beautiful that they must be lies, for such places could never be attained by trams.
Mirar los flores
. If a tram could nurse such an ambition it had better relinquish it, the utmost it could hope for would be a municipal cemetery. The tram stopped, and he boarded it, heaven knew why, and climbed to the upper deck. No sooner had he sat down than the conductor came scolding after him to ask why he had not paid on getting in. He realised the short-sightedness of coming to South America, a place where one immediately became involved in a foreign language and a foreign currency. However, he had changed some money, so mutely he held out a coin which seemed to be of a suitable size. The conductor continued to address him, perhaps one had to explain how far one wished to be taken. “Cemeterio,” he said, absently, and felt his heart stumble at the sound of his naked voice, and his limbs dissolving in a sweat. After the man had moved away he recovered himself, and began to look out of the window.

It was one of those rather Edgeware Road districts, common to all famous cities, and for a while everything he saw seemed so familiar that he was scarcely aware of seeing anything. Then, looking up a side-street, he saw the mountains.

Under the strong thick sun they appeared to lack all spatial relationship to the foreground. They might be near or remote, cardboard or cloud. Indeed, in the first unrecognising moment he had an idea that they must be some kind of advertisement, and it was only in losing sight of them with the progress of the tram that he knew that his flesh had already quickened with an authentic excitement and acknowledgment. An icy breath of snow seemed to dart into the sweltering tram, a shattering whiteness to dazzle his eyes; and in a minute, up the next side-street, he was looking at them again, and already their outline was familiar, and they, once more, were slightly unreal and flimsy, as though they were purposely misrepresenting themselves to the eye of man. And then, without in any way changing, they put on their true being, and rose up out of a continent, with time wandering across their slopes like a slight cloud, and ships and cities scattered at their base no weightier than cobwebs.

Absently, his mind fingered their names like a string of bright beads. Man, armed with intelligence like a housewife with a feather whisk, runs through the world, hasty and tidy, dabbing at this and that with an exploration, with a name. Whether a summit be called Chimborazo or Mount Brown is but a dab with the whisk; for the existence of being a mountain there is no name and no possible exploration; mysteriously emerging and subsiding, the mountains heave along the land in a secrecy as unassailable as that of the waves wandering along the ocean. It is for fear that man has snatched up the feather whisk. This Tom, Dick, and Harrying of Chimborazo and Mount Brown is the familiarity, rather vulgar, of the parvenu. So, in the war—he had heard—people would call one death or another Minnie or Bertha. Yet these accredited, licensed fears (so, sitting in the tram, he thought) are man's expedient against a vaster terror. We hire the fear of death to protect us against the fear of life. Man sets the unscalable Himalayas as a guard between himself and a blade of grass.

The tram jolted to a stop, people began to squeeze past him. He shut his eyes and tried to shut his senses, knowing that only with the renewed movement of the tram would his thoughts begin to move again. For their life was not really in him. He had nothing of his own, not even his thoughts. The jolting of an iron vehicle must dispense the possible understanding of a mountain to him, and for every moment that the jolting was withheld his meditations withered like plants without water. There was a touch on his shoulder. He looked up. The conductor was standing beside him, and the tram was empty.

Obediently descending to the pavement, he felt the sun strike on him with brutality. He looked round for somewhere else where he could sit. As, in a city, one may not sit on the ground, there was nowhere. But even in a city one may lean; and propped against a standard he looked at his tram turning its head into its tail, and hoped that it might soon fill up, and move off, and be followed by another; for there would be no social conventions to prevent him climbing on to that, seeing the mountains again, and continuing his thoughts. But before the next tram came all thinking had died under the motionless heat, and there was nothing to be done but to be carried back to where he had started from, and then to set about finding somewhere to lodge. Tomorrow he must find another job: another clerkship, a steward's place, or a job as a cook's help—he could wash dishes very carefully.

For the last eighteen months he had lived by the sea, at haphazard, picking up one temporary job after another. During that time he discovered that there were many such as himself: men who had taken to the sea as women take to the streets. It is not much of a life, and leads to nothing, but it is casual, and anonymous, and no mental effort or choice is involved. Another voyage, another man...whither, who, it does not matter. All that matters is that they should be like the second tram, into which one might step unrecognised, free of the personal existence imposed on one by the attention of our fellows. So, shadowy, uncontinuing, negligible to others, one might ease a little the burden of being still real, continuous, and painful to oneself.

But searching from one office and bureau to another he found he was not so dispurposed as formerly. Something in him, call it, for the sake of convenience, a soul, had accomplished the next journey already and, looking at the mountains, had traversed them and descended to the plains beyond. There, in that vast meadow, it waited for him to follow it with the baggage of bodily sense. Time enough, he said. I show no signs of dying. Time enough. That ever-rolling stream has washed me to some queer places, and one day perhaps will carry me there too. If not, it is no great matter. And it was with no thought of a cannon that he signed on as cook's help in a cargo boat bound for Lisbon.

But one night, waking and knowing by the gait of the vessel that it was now riding the open sea, he felt with vehemence that the first stage of his journey was begun, and his impatience alone seemed to swing the boat on with lengthening stride over the enlarging waves. In his mind's eye he saw, dimly distinct on the night, the pattern of broken lace incessantly jolted backward from her sides, the trailing and forsaken wake. It was his impatience that ravaged the face of ocean with these fleeting shows, that startled from every sleek mound of water this response of astonished foam. Silenced under the blackness of night was the colour he had noticed so often and never seen till now, when his memory gave it to him: the blue, so intense, so candid as to be in some way piteous, that the passage of the ship leaves in its wake—a colour like a wound, ripped by the iron out of the secretive grey of unbroken water. The colour of the sea's wound, he thought; its most blue and precious blood streaming.

Arrived at Lisbon he sought out a boat which would take him across the Atlantic again, scarcely aware that he was in Europe, so anxiously did his thoughts lean westward. There was no longer time enough, his indifference, that safe cold cloak, was gone, and he was once more capable of fear and vulnerably conscious of beauty. But no beauty could stay him; the sights that might have pleased his eyes only warned him onward, waving to him their admonition of fleetingness.

Coming to Rio de Janeiro when the newly risen sun glittered on the bay that is dotted with little islands—islets so exquisite and fastidious that they appear to have been composed by some romantic milliner, selecting for each a tree, a couple of flowering bushes, and a score of butterflies—more than beauty assailed him; for here, as in some unreal and childish paradise, the existence of his lost island seemed commemorated, and every frond waving in the land breeze beckoned him to stay and rest for ever. But the impulse to lean over and drown in the reflection of one of these bright effigies lasted for barely a minute, blown away by the strength of his purpose.

There was not time, so it seemed, for self-murder. Death among these radiant islets was a whimsical excursion that he, bound upon another journey, must forgo. And, still admiring, he fell to wondering what the pampas would be like. A wide place; a green expanse, impassive and solitary; a place where there would be elbow-room for sorrow.

Make haste, make haste! There was so little time, and he might die before he came there, and be defrauded of his grief. Happiness was on the island, where he had left it; but there, awaiting him on those green plains, if only he could get so far, was sorrow, an experience as deep and assuaging as the other. In all these years of dingy exile he had never once had time to put on his sorrow. It had lain folded and hidden within him like a garment folded in a travelling-trunk. And unless he made haste he might never wear it, for with every day it grew more crumpled, more sullied with disuse, its embroideries perishing, its texture rotting and creased. This heavenly treasure laid up in an earthly carcass, he had lugged it about from port to port. It's a wonder, he thought, that I didn't present it to a museum with all the other things I brought from the island.
Example of a sorrow, full-length. Made by an Englishman in the Southern Hemisphere. Presented by, etc
. The lettering would be calm and neat, a lettering equally applicable to gold-bearing nuggets and marsupials. Yes, if it had occurred to me, no doubt I should have jettisoned it in the museum, with the rest. I told myself that I relinquished them from an aesthetic compassion, saying that I could not endure to see them getting so battered and dimmed with being carried about; but it was pique, really, an angry self-mutilation. That was at Sydney, nearly two years ago. Meanwhile I have carried my sorrow about with me, never lifting the lid, never daring to put it on, only knowing it as a weight to be carried about. I had no chance to wear it, I told myself, for sorrow is not a garment to wear in a cook's galley, or among the greedy bugs and whoremongers of a seaport. But that was the excuse my cowardice made, choosing to wander in such a life, skulking in that busy ignominy, nor daring, indeed, to put on sorrow.

Now, perhaps, it was forfeit. Arriving at Buenos Ayres he found that it was thronged with such as he, but younger and better qualified; it seemed that he would never finish his journey. And he would have despaired, if it had not been for the recollection of how he had seen the mountains from a tram, and his conviction that something, called for convenience' sake a soul, was already arrived at the journey's end, and awaited him there, making ready a place for him. Then he had seen an advertisement, and answering it he was hired to give English lessons to an ageing harlot who proposed to found a brothel. Starving himself, except for the sweetmeats she gave him, and sleeping out of doors, he had saved his wages until he had put by enough money to travel to San Diego by train.

It was strange to be in a train once more, like a gentleman; like a gentleman to be going where he willed with no obligation to do anything about it except pay some money and preserve his ticket, able to look out of the window and observe with condescension the contours of the landscape as though it were laid out for sale—but he would not buy this bit or even examine it, it was nothing to him, only so much more earth over which gangs of sweating men had, under the direction of skilled engineers, laid down iron rails. Further down the car four men were playing cards. They played game after game, and at the end of each game they quarrelled and abused each other. He knew enough Spanish now to understand most of what they were saying, but there was no need to listen or to take any interest in them, for as long as he had his ticket he was free of his fellow-men, humanity existed only to procure his journey, to be borne along with him, or to be left behind, small figures rooted in earth or impaled on platforms, cast away from him by this transit which he could wrap about him like a cloak. He had caught a chill, sleeping out, and now it was heavy on him, so that his head ached, and his back, and thrills of fever ran across his limbs like some esoteric species of pleasure. And thus he came to San Diego, and gave up his ticket, shivering at the contact with fresh air; and suddenly, as though he had left it behind in the rack, he knew that he had mislaid his purpose, that there was no more reason why he should be here than anywhere else, that it was not his journey's end that he confronted, but another stage in a purposeless journey.