Flames Coming out of the Top (29 page)

He lay on his back staring up at her, and then beckoned for her to lean forward. “Carmel,” he said, “don't you worry. I'll soon be better. They're not going to take you away from me. …” The rest of the speech remained unfinished. Whatever drug the good-humoured doctor had shot into him began to take effect. He tried to go on with what he was saying but the words faded out on his tongue. Then he slept.

It was in a state nearer sleeping than waking that he covered the two hundred and odd miles back to Canagua and so to Sandar. He never emerged from the close mist that surrounded him. Figures—Carmel, the Captain, the doctor and others whom he could not distinguish—came up to him suddenly out of nothing, remained there looming over him for a moment, and then drifted away again into space. He remembered talking to them, but could not recall what was said. It was as though after long periods of death he kept returning to life.

The first impression that was really clear was of being moved on to a stretcher when they reached Sandar. He saw all that quite clearly and was surprised to see how fat his leg looked: it was swathed in bandages right down to his foot. He laughed a little at its oddness—it looked so like a rolled up carpet in a
dust sheet. Then Carmel came and spoke to him, and the fact comforted him. He said the word “carpet” to her several times so that she could share in his little joke, but he could not make her understand, and he saw the doctor shake his head and lead her away. The doctor thought him delirious, he realised. He told him very clearly that he wasn't, speaking logically and distinctly to disillusion him; but when he looked up he saw the doctor wasn't there, and the bearers were taking him down the main street as if he were a procession.

Another doctor came to look at his leg after they had got Dunnett into the room for the night. The two medicals conferred in hushed, respectful whispers. It was not every day that they saw a leg like that. They told him they were going to dress it as it had gone septic; but their supply of anaesthetics had run out. Their technique was of the simplest. They rested the leg across two chairs like a bridge and placed a tin pail beneath. When they got to work it was with an edgeless scalpel and some debatable cotton wool. They desisted when Dunnett slid clean off between the two chairs in a faint.

As the poisons spread through him and he grew worse he called more frequently for Carmel. But she was not there. She was resting in her room they said. He grew anxious, and asked how long he had been in Sandar. They told him six days, and he lay without talking, pondering the tricks that time can play upon a sick man. But was she all right? he asked. Had she come to no harm from her ordeal? They assured him that she was untouched; and for the moment he was satisfied. Then he enquired if they had told her that he was asking for her, asking for her all the time he was awake. But they didn't seem to hear that: the question remained unanswered.

On the tenth day the doctor broke the news to him that they could do nothing more for him: the equipment at Sandar was too primitive; if they were going to save the leg, he said, they would have to operate down at Amricante. The news staggered Dunnett: he had no idea that he was as bad as that. But
apparently it was true. Half his leg wasn't living flesh any longer. It was corrupting before their eyes.

“But if I go,” he asked, “what'll happen to the girl?”

“What girl?”

“Carmel Muras. The girl who was in the boat with me.”

They laughed. “She'll be all right,” they said. “She can look after herself.”

The reply did not satisfy him. “She's in my charge,” he said. “I've got to look after her.”

“You look after yourself,” the new doctor advised. “You've got plenty to do there without looking after other people.”

“But I'm going to take her back to Amricante. She must come with me.”

“Not in a hospital car,” the doctor explained. “She couldn't travel in that. You go on first and she'll follow.”

He was so tired that he agreed to what they said; he had no strength left to raise any more objections. But it seemed strange that she shouldn't want to come with him— not after what had happened in the boat. He wondered if she were really all right, and a panic seized him.

“She isn't dead, is she?” he asked.

“Oh no,” they told him. “She isn't dead.”

They placed him on the hospital train at five-thirty next morning. Carmel was not there to see him off. He knew then that she
was
dead, that all he had done for her had been in vain, and he wept. It had all been so useless, so futile, this sudden, passionate love of theirs. He wondered what there could be in the bigger scheme of things that allows a thing like that to be created only to be killed.

The hospital wagon into which they were sliding him like a corpse into a hearse, as though he were dead already, was scarcely larger than a horse box. There were eleven other occupants. The orderly in charge was apologetic but comforting. Soon they would be only ten, he said. The occupant in bunk A2 had a shattered pelvis: the vibration of the train wouldn't give him a chance.

The doctor from the launch came down to see him off just before the train started. Dunnett called again for Carmel, cried out that they were keeping her from him, and begged them to find her somehow. The doctor appeared uncomfortable for a moment and then ran his finger round his neck inside the band of his collar.

“Was she a special friend of yours?” he asked.

Dunnett nodded.

“Well, she's left you,” the doctor said. “Gone off with one of the officers. The Peruvian one. They left three days back.”

“Why didn't they tell me?” Dunnett asked.

“No use,” said the doctor. “You weren't well enough.”

Dunnett was silent. “She must have thought,” he said at last, speaking aloud as though the other man were not there, “that I didn't love her just because of the way I behaved. But I couldn't help it. I had to get the boat along. If I'd been any different we'd both have been lost.”

“Sure,” said the doctor. “You'd both have been lost.”

The engine gave a sudden, frantic whistle and there was the erratic rattle of loose couplings taking up a strain. The doctor removed himself and Dunnett was left alone.

“We'd both of us have been lost,” he repeated as he felt the train get into motion. “What I was doing I was only doing for her, and she didn't understand.” Now that he had lost her he knew desperately how much she meant to him. Even with Kay, life could never again be kindled as it had been that night in the boat.

He was still crying when the orderly and an assistant came along to remove what was left of the man who had had his pelvis shattered.

The medical orderly to whom Dunnett was entrusted by the doctor was a highly efficient young man; and he knew his job. He came over and began smoothing Dunnett's pillow.

“Have you got any money?” he asked.

There was some in his coat Dunnett told him; but when he reached out his hand for it he recalled that it had gone; his coat and Señor Muras's cheque were somewhere at the bottom of the military river.

The medical orderly passed on and Dunnett could hear him asking the same question of the man in the bunk beneath. Evidently he had learnt that with men as ill as that it was well to extract his tips beforehand: the medical superintendent impounded all effects when he issued the death certificate.

The journey was not an easy one. There were too many of them in that narrow, blazing wagon: the sense of other bodies, beside one, over one, under one, was too oppressive. It was like lying down with a herd. And there were always the hospital sounds that sick men make—little whimpers, groans, gurglings in the throat like the death rattle itself, stray words whispered as though the person they were addressed to were at hand and bending over to catch them, shouts and commands. For hours on end Dunnett slept. He would emerge from one thick cloudy sleep to plunge into another, denser and more stifling than before. Nothing seemed any longer to matter. He turned over in his mind everything that had happened and saw it all dispassionately like the adventures of a stranger. “If only my leg would stop hurting,” he told himself. “Then I should be able to think. I've still got Kay. She'll understand if I tell her. She won't leave me just because I'm as ill as this.”

The journey to Amricante took eleven days. It was a landslide that held them up. Half a mile of mountain had detached itself from its native range and made its way majestically into the valley. In its course it had picked up the railway lines and carried them down with it: one of the rails could be seen a hundred yards below looped round a tree like a horseshoe. There was a gang of platelayers at work there: their problem was to unite the broken ends of metal that were separated by eight hundred yards of still-moving rock. On the fourth morning of the wait the engineers finished their task and the hospital train moved forward at a walking pace.

For the last hundred miles of the journey, Dunnett felt strangely clearer. He now lay awake for hours on end, thinking.

The sickness had cleared somewhat, leaving that strange, feverish planning for the future that succeeds all illnesses. He devised endless schemes for distraining on the supposititious fortune of Señor Muras. It was only when he began working out the actual details that his head swam and his mind became clouded again.

His leg continued to drive long splinters of pain up into his thigh: perhaps it was that which kept him awake. From time to time the orderly would put cold compresses on his knee and then forget to change them. But Dunnett no longer minded. Nothing seemed really to matter so long as at the end of it all there was a ship waiting to carry him back to Kay.

When the train had finished crawling over the endless central roof of the Andes and began nosing its way for some easy staircase to take it down into the littoral, all Dunnett's courage had returned to him. It was true that he had failed— but against what odds? When he had left Amricante six weeks before—yes that was it: nearly fifty days of peril and discomfort—he had not seen his home-coming quite like this. He was penniless, disappointed and wounded. But he still did not doubt that somehow in Amricante he could put everything right; what Señor Muras had said about him had been true.

The orderly put him on to the platform with very little ceremony indeed. He just gave him a hand down the steps and left him there. With so many of the military on the train it was not to be expected that a civilian of no special importance would be given any particular attention. Dunnett put out his hand to steady himself. He was weaker than he had realised. The whole station seemed to be folding in and collapsing on him. He sat down on somebody else's trunk and waited for his head to clear.

The distance from the station to the Avenida was about 400 yards. It took him more than an hour to cover it. The
only support was a rubber-ferruled stick which the orderly had not thought worth while stealing. Bracing his leg for the strain, he set out into the brilliant glare outside the station. He kept close to the wall all the way, trying to find some shade and something to hold on to. When he turned the corner and came upon the discoloured frontage of the Avenida he left the protection of the supporting wall and began limping across the dazzling white roadway; his leg sent stabs of red hot pain into him at every step. The Avenida itself looked more down at heel even than usual. The windows were uncleaned and the tin cages that had once held flowers now hung empty over the pavement. It was then that he noticed that there was a thin board covered in black crêpe nailed to the front of each window. His mind entirely failed to comprehend the significance of it. He had entirely forgotten the recent existence of Señor Alvarez.

By the time that he reached the double swing doors, his head began reeling again: everything in Amricante was swaying before his eyes. Then he stood quite still panting and trying to recover himself. It was only now it was over that he realised what an ordeal it had been getting there. Inside, everything seemed quiet and very subdued; it was like slipping suddenly into evening. After the glare outside he could scarcely see. Then gradually the old, familiar shapes began to reassert themselves—the moulting couches, the staircase that sagged, the wicker chairs in rows that spoke of the grand days when the hotel had been crowded.

There was a long mirror in the wall that showed him up as he stood there. It was no more than a faint shadowy image that confronted him: but it was enough. He saw a pair of sunken burning eyes peering out from a brown, haggard face covered with two weeks' stubble of beard. His hair hung over his ears in trailing wisps. And his clothes: they were wild, tattered garments of the kind that castaways wear. He wondered dully what had become of the suit of tropical ducks that he had gone away in—he couldn't believe that they could have changed to this.

He became aware that someone was watching him from the shadows of the desk. He moved forward and the person withdrew a little. Then he saw that it was Maria Alvarez. She evidently did not recognise him.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“It's me, Harold Dunnett,” he said. “I've come back.”

It Was only when he was lying on his back under the mosquito netting in an upstairs bedroom that he realised that he had let Maria Alvarez put him to bed. He could not remember whether anyone else had been present, could remember very little from the moment he had re-entered the front door; all that he knew was that Maria had stripped him and that he was now in bed. He had been like a child in the matter, holding up his hands above his head so that she could pull his shirt off his back, and crying out when by accident she touched his leg. But not like a child altogether. For he had never for a moment forgotten that this was a woman who was waiting on him, someone with gentle hands and a quiet voice. She had placed his pillows ready for him, and he had lain back at last, unthinkably at rest. Soon his eyes were shut. He slept.