Flames Coming out of the Top (28 page)

Then, when she was quiet again, he removed the arm that was about her, and got up. She did not stir. He put one leg over the side of the boat and swung his wounded leg after it. The sand felt firm and buoyant to his feet. It stretched in front of him a low, silver island in the midst of that hurrying river. He walked to the further end where the waters parted. The mist had cleared and it was starlight by now, clear and fresh and empty. Standing there looking at the everlasting sea of water rolling down to meet him he felt strangely lonely and aloof. He seemed remote even from himself, as if he were detached from his own body and were standing somewhere close at hand. He was like a man who has been brought face to face with his own destiny.

He did not go back to the boat until he heard Carmel's frightened voice calling for him.

They Proceeded again up the river almost as soon as it was light. Dunnett had not slept and was sitting ready in the stern when the light broke. It was the sound of the paddle that woke Carmel. She sat up and shaded her eyes with her hand, The sun caught Dunnett as he sat there and lit him up like a window. His pale hair that fringed his head was a halo; it glowed. Beneath it, his face looked drawn and bloodless. She spoke his name, but he did not answer. He did not even appear to have heard her. His eyes were fixed on the river ahead of them and his lips were moving in time with the paddle. “One two, one two, one two,” she could hear him saying. There was no distracting him. His goal lay somewhere out of sight in the future of things; and he was getting there in a desperate, but still orderly, panic.

From time to time he would stop and shift his injured leg. He had to put down his paddle to do so and shift it with his two hands as though the limb were already dead. Carmel crept forward to be beside him, but he motioned her away. She saw then how bad the wound had been; the heat had drawn the flesh apart so that the bone showed through white and dry like paper.

“I did that,” she said. “I'd give my life for it not to have happened.” She began stroking the sleeve of his coat to ask if she were forgiven. But he said nothing. He did not even seem to notice her, he was so much preoccupied with flight. Whenever he paused, he would glance over his shoulder for a moment to see if they were being followed and then start paddling again. But he said nothing.

They finished the
yerba
at midday. Carmel threw back her head and let the last few drops fall straight into her throat.
It stung as it touched. But the drops were magical. Even the thin, desultory trickle seemed to infuse some life into her. It gave her, for a moment at least, a new estimation of the future; she was no longer
certain
that they would lose. Not that she really ever expected that this crazy figure in the stern of the boat would succeed in what he had set out to do; the dice were loaded far too heavily against him for that. But there he was, the sun pouring down on his blistered shoulders and one leg stuck out in front stiff and useless like a crutch, and he was paddling as though he really believed that he would get somewhere. “He thinks he's in England where everything's small,” she kept saying to herself. “He doesn't know what he's trying to do.” And she was right, for when she offered to take over the paddling from him he shook his head and kept on with it himself.

“We must be halfway,” he muttered. “Halfway to somewhere.”

But the breaks became longer and more frequent. It was not courage that he was revealing, but obstinacy. Every quarter of an hour he would steer into the bank and clutch at one of the overhanging branches. Then he would remain there gasping. He no longer looked in her direction at all. Either his eyes were closed as he rested or he was peering anxiously down the river for snags and sandbars. Once she stirred because she thought she heard him say something. But she found that he was only singing as he paddled; he was breathlessly and unmusically chanting. He seemed no longer to be sharing her world at all.

After midday, when no other village had come into sight, and the forest had closed in on them more thickly, more finally than before, she began crying out, and begged him to go back. But he paid no heed to her. He did not answer until he had brought the boat to rest. “If anything happens to me,” he said, “you go on. Don't do the other thing or they'll kill you.”

“But we'll die if we go on. There's nothing in front of us but the forest.”

“Men live in the forest, don't they?”

“Not white men.”

“It's the same thing.”

“No it isn't; white men go crazy.”

“Well, we're not crazy yet.”

He sat back, massaging his shoulder where it ached. His arm jerked as though he were still paddling. Then he took up the paddle and pulled the boat into midstream again. A moment later he was bent over the paddle once more, silent, morose, obsessed.

When he collapsed, it came quite suddenly. At one moment he was working desperately like a labouring engine and, at the next, he was lying in the bottom of the boat, unconscious. The boat swung round for a moment and then ran itself backwards with a crash into the bank. Carmel could feel the hard knuckles of the tree roots as the hull ran over them.

She turned Dunnett over and began splashing water on to his face and chafing his hands. The palms of them were cracked and bleeding. When Carmel saw them she began crying again.

“We must go on,” he said faintly. “They'll be catching up with us.”

But he was not strong enough. When he moved, his stomach turned on him. He lay back again, retching.

“I guess this is the end for both of us,” she said.

He shook his head. “I'll soon be better,” he answered. “Then we'll get on again.”

It was then that his eye caught the spot where the boat had touched the bank; the wood was stove in and a thin spurt of water was playing through. He put his heel against it and the leak gaped.

“That's about the end of things,” he said quietly.

They rested where they were for an hour, two hours, three hours—they had lost count of ordinary time. They only knew that the sun shifted from one bank to the other, and that they felt fainter for want of food. Dangling above their heads, like
the fists of giants, bunches of bananas grew; but it would have needed a monkey to get at them.

When a river hog came close to drink, going on to its knees to get at the water, Dunnett suddenly snatched at his revolver and fired at it. An elementary chain of thought came into his mind that it was food and that he should have it. But it was no use. The river hog only squealed. Then rising from its prayers it began running off into the thicknesses still squealing. It became a faint sound in a large space and Dunnett knew that, alive or dead, it had got away from him.

“Don't waste those bullets, we shall need them,” Carmel said.

“What for?” he asked.

“For us,” she told him.

“Not yet,” he answered. “We're not done for yet.”

There was a pause.

“Why don't you go back?” she implored. “It's with the current. We could drift there.”

“Not in this boat we can't,” he said. “We've stove her in. She'd sink if we took her out there. Besides, they'd kill us if they found us.”

“Then what are we to do?” Carmel asked.

“Sit here,” Dunnett answered. “Sit here and wait.”

“How long?”

“Till something turns up.”

“I'd rather die.”

“You may do both.”

He laughed as he said it, but Carmel did not laugh. She was looking at his fixed, unsmiling eyes.

“Give me that revolver,” she said quietly. “I know what happens to people who're lost in the jungle.”

But Dunnett shook his head. “You're too young to die. Far too young.”

“Give it to me.”

“It stops where it is,” Dunnett answered. “In my holster.” She came to him and began striking at him with her fists. “You can't stop me. You can't stop me,” she screamed.

“If you don't give it to me now, I'll take it when you're asleep. I'm going to kill myself, I tell you. I'm going to kill myself. It's my life.”

Dunnett did not reply immediately. He looked first at her and unbuttoned his holster at his revolver. Then as she made to snatch it he threw it as far as he could into the stream. It made a plop like a large fish jumping.

“That's that,” he said, as the ripples cleared away. “Now we've
got
to wait.”

That night they lay against each other. There was no passion now. Only fatigue. And there seemed somehow to be safety in nearness. It was as though two defenceless bodies had become invincible simply by being together.

Carmel stirred often in the night, waking up and calling for her father. He calmed her each time and put his arm around her. And in the morning they lay as they were without moving. Even the effort of raising the body on to an elbow had become too great to be endured. They just lay there, waiting.

Five hours later something roused them. It was a burst of what sounded like music. It was faint and died away almost as soon as it had been born. But what remained was a low, regular beat, a vibration almost like that of
tom-toms
. Dunnett sat up and listened. Carmel had heard it too. He saw her eyes questioning, and shook his head; it was nothing, he told her, only some trick of the jungle. Then the music grew louder. A long wail reached them and hung around; it was no illusion. The beat of the unseen drums grew louder. Carmel thrust out her hand and Dunnett took it in his.

“I guess this finishes us,” she said.

But as they listened the note of
tom-toms
changed and resoived itself into the exhaust throb of a motor-boat engine. Only the music remained inexplicable. It was something weird and erratic, this sequestered orchestra in the jungle. Perhaps their tired minds had conjured it all up out of nothing. As they wondered, the hidden boat turned a bend in the river
and the music was close at hand. It was a tune they had both danced to. The launch, moreover, they realised, was coming from the Bolivian side. Underneath a long awning sat a group of officers. One was more magnifcent than the rest. He was a Peruvian military observer on a conducted tour from Canagua. His brilliant white ducks and green and gold epaulettes made him a man apart, a being aloof from the sordid traffic of war. At his feet stood a gramophone, on which a fox-trot record was dizzily revolving.

As soon as Dunnett saw the launch he pushed off and began paddling crazily towards it; he was no longer steady enough even to use the blade properly. Great scoops of water went off over his shoulder at every other stroke. But he went on paddling like a maniac, shouting as he came.

The apparition caused considerable consternation on the launch. The man in the bows raised his rifle and covered the curious-looking craft in front of him. Then everyone stood up and came crowding forward. The officer in charge was uncertain whether he was taking part in a rescue or an ambush.

He was not left long in doubt, however. Dunnett's boat was filling rapidly by the bows. The water was coming in so fast that the gunwales were already nearly level with the surface. The first impression was that of a frenzied figure sitting up in the river and paddling without any kind of support. The officer in the launch told the look-out to put down his rifle and throw a length of rope in their direction. It came through the air uncoiling itself like a lasso.

The length of rope was the last thing that Dunnett remembered. At the next moment the boat filled and slid away from under them.

The Launch had turned and was six miles up stream with the engine driving hard and the gramophone stopped, before Dunnett opened his eyes again. When he did so he found an army officer with the twin bands of the Bolivian medical corps on his sleeves sitting beside him. There was a hypodermic syringe in his hand and he was cleaning the needle on his pocket handkerchief.

He smiled when he saw that Dunnett was looking at him. “Near shave,” he said cheerfully. “You went under the boat. We couldn't find you.”

Dunnett tried to raise himself on his elbow, but found that there was no strength left in him. “The girl,” he said. “Is she all right?”

The doctor smiled back again. “She's all right,” he said. “We got her out first.”

When he was strong enough to move, Dunnett could see Carmel. She was lying on a pile of deck cushions under the awning. Everyone who wasn't actually engaged in navigating the launch was doing something for her. The Peruvian military attaché was particularly engaged. He had a drink in his hand and was holding it to her lips. Dunnett looked for a moment at the little scene and then closed his eyes again. For no reason he began to cry. It all seemed so simple now that it was over; so unbelievably simple. He couldn't even see where he could ever have gone wrong. He had rescued a girl from a beseiged city and carried her through fire and bloodshed into safety. He supposed he was something of a hero. They'd talk about him when he got back; Harold Dunnett, V.C.

And then he remembered Señor Muras's cheque. It was
in the inside breast pocket of his coat. But where was his coat? He recalled struggling out of something clammy when the boat had sunk and decided that must be it. At the realisation he forced himself up on to his knees and began clambering towards the side of the launch. “My coat,” he said. “I must get my coat.” But the Bolivian medical officer forced him down and put his knee on his chest until he was quiet again.

After that he lay there, quite still. He lived over again those two nights in the boat. It was there that things stopped being simple. No matter what happened he belonged to Carmel now; he realised that, in that moment when he had taken her in his arms, he had flung away the future.

He called her and she came over to him. She stroked the hair back from his forehead. “You've been swell,” she said.