Chapter Three
CAPTAIN FELLOWS sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region-patches of varying brown with two small lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. Going home, going home, the food will be good for m-e-e. I don't like the food in the bloody citee. He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. I don't like your snouts, O trouts. I don't like your snouts, O trouts. He was a happy man.
The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere-he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy-doing a mans job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war-time France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a buzzard lay spread out in the sky. Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich-food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature-a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the bloodstream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again-somebody else's words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter's home from the sea. The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.
He thought: After all, a man likes to be welcomed.
He walked up to his bungalow: it was distinguished from [27] the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flagpost without a flag, a plate on the door with the title, Central American Banana Company. Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife-it was not she he had expected. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted: 'Daddy's home. A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs. Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said: Pleased to see me, Trix? and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk-and the answer, of course, is a sausage.
I'm glad to be home, Captain Fellows said, and he believed it. It was his one firm conviction-that he really felt the correct emotions of love and joy and grief and hate. He had always been a good man at zero hour.
All well at the office?
Fine, Fellows said, fine.
I had a bit of fever yesterday.
Ah, you need looking after. You'll be all right now, he said vaguely, that I'm home. He shied merrily away from the subject of fever-clapping his hands, a big laugh, while she trembled in her tent. Where's Coral?
She's with the policeman, Mrs. Fellows said.
I hoped she'd meet me, he said, roaming aimlessly about the little, inferior room, full of boot-trees, while his brain caught up with her. Policeman? What policeman?
He came last night and Coral let him sleep on the veranda. He's looking for somebody, she says.
What an extraordinary thing! Here?
He's not an ordinary policeman. He's an officer. He left his men in the village-Coral says.
I do think you ought to be up, he said. I mean-these fellows, you can't trust them. He felt no conviction when he added: She's just a kid.
I tell you I had fever, Mrs. Fellows wailed. I felt so terribly ill.
You'll be all right. just a touch of the sun. You'll see-now I'm home.
[28] I had such a headache. I couldn't read or sew. And then this man ...
Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it-in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo-death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.
He said: I suppose I ought to go and see the man.
He sat down on the bed and put his hand upon her arm. They had something in common-a kind of diffidence. He said absent-mindedly: That dago secretary of the boss has gone.
Where?
West. He could feel her arm go stiff: she strained away from him towards the wall. He had touched the taboo-he shared it, the bond was broken, he couldn't tell why. Headache, darling?
Hadn't you better see the man?
Oh, yes, yes. I'll be off. But he didn't stir: it was the child who came to him
She stood in the doorway watching them with a look of immense responsibility. Before her serious gaze they became a boy you couldn't trust and a ghost you could almost puff away: a piece of frightened air. She was very young-about thirteen-and at that age you are not afraid of many things, age and death, all the things which may turn up, snake-bite and fever and rats and a bad smell. Life hadn't got at her yet: she had a false air of impregnability. But she had been reduced already, as it were, to the smallest terms-everything was there but on the thinnest lines. That was what the sun did to a child, reduced it to a framework. The gold bangle on the bony wrist was like a padlock on a canvas door a fist could break. She said: I told the policeman you were home.
Oh, yes, yes, Captain Fellows said. Got a kiss for your old father?
She came solemnly across the room and kissed him formally upon the forehead-he could feel the lack of meaning. She had other things to think about. She said: I told cook that mother would not be getting up for dinner.
[29] I think you ought to make the effort, dear, Captain Fellows said.
Why? Coral said.
Oh well ...
Coral said: I want to talk to you alone. Mrs. Fellows shifted inside her tent-just so she could be certain Coral would arrange the final evacuation. Common sense was a horrifying quality she had never possessed: it was common sense which said: The dead can't hear or She can't know now or Tin flowers are more practical.
I don't understand, Captain Fellows said uneasily, why your mother shouldn't hear.
She wouldn't want to go. It would only scare her.
Coral-he was accustomed to it by now-had an answer to everything. She never spoke without deliberation: she was prepared-but sometimes the answers she had prepared seemed to him of a wildness. ... They were based on the only life she could remember-this. The swamp and vultures and no children anywhere, except a few in the village, with bellies swollen by worms, who ate dirt from the bank, inhumanly. A child is said to draw parents together, and certainly he felt an immense unwillingness to entrust himself to this child. Her answers might carry him anywhere. He felt through the net for his wife's hand-secretively: they were adults together. This was the stranger in their house. He said boisterously: You're frightening us.