The Country of the Blind and other Selected Stories Page 43

  He put down the glasses abruptly, realizing that the question of discipline between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.

  ‘It is your duty,’ said the captain, ‘to go aboard. It is my instructions.’

  The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of the mulatto sailors appeared beside him.

  ‘I believe these men were killed by the ants,’ said Holroyd abruptly in English.

  The captain burst into a rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. ‘I have commanded you to go aboard,’ he screamed to his subordinate in Portuguese. ‘If you do not go aboard forthwith it is mutiny – rank mutiny. Mutiny and cowardice! Where is the courage that should animate us? I will have you in irons, I will have you shot like a dog.’ He began a torrent of abuse and curses, he danced to and fro. He shook his fists, he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and still, stood looking at him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed faces.

  Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some heroic decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the deck of the cuberta.

  ‘Ah!’ said Gerilleaur and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the ants retreating before da Cunha’s boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to the fallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned him over. A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha stepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.

  Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the invader’s feet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They had nothing of the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking at him – as a rallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster that had dispersed it.

  ‘How did he die?’ the captain shouted.

  Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to tell.

  ‘What is there forward?’ asked Gerilleau.

  The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese. He stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some peculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and went quickly towards the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about, walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore decking, from which the sweeps are worked, stooped for a time over the second man, groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin, moving very rigidly. He turned and began a conversation with his captain, cold and respectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly with the wrath and insult of a few moments before. Holroyd gathered only fragments of its purport.

  He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants had vanished from all the exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned towards the shadows beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full of watching eyes.

  The cuberta, it was agreed, was derelict, but too full of ants to put men aboard to sit and sleep: it must be towed. The lieutenant went forward to take in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood up to be ready to help him. Holroyd’s glasses searched the canoe.

  He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic ants – they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length – carrying oddly-shaped burthens for which he could imagine no use – were moving in rushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in columns across the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly suggestive of the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A number were taking cover under the dead man’s clothes, and a perfect swarm was gathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently go.

  He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but he has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant was shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. ‘I’m stung!’ he shouted, with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.

  Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at once into the water. Holroyd heard the splash.

  The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and that night he died.

  3

  Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen and contorted body of the lieutenant lay and stood together at the stern of the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind them. It was a close, dark night that had only phantom flickerings of sheet lightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked about in the steamer’s wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the black smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over her swaying masts.

  Gerilleau’s mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant had said in the heat of his last fever.

  ‘He says I murdered ’im,’ he protested. ‘It is simply absurd. Someone ’ad to go aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded ants whenever they show up?’

  Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little black shapes across bare sunlit planking.

  ‘It was his place to go,’ harped Gerilleau. ‘He died in the execution of his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered!… But the poor fellow was – what is it? – demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison swelled him.… U’m.’

  They came to a long silence.

  ‘We will sink that canoe – burn it.’

  ‘And then?’

  The enquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew out at right angles from his body. ‘What is one to do?’ he said, his voice going up to an angry squeak.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he broke out vindictively, ‘every ant in dat cuberta! – I will burn dem alive!’

  Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling monkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the gunboat drew near the black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a depressing clamour of frogs.

  ‘What is one to do?’ the captain repeated after a vast interval, and suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the Santa Rosa without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleased by that idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon the cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of the tropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and his stoker stood behind him watching also.

  The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. ‘Saüba go pop, pop,’ he said. ‘Wahaw!’ and laughed richly.

  But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe had also eyes and brains.

  The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but – what was one to do? This question came back enormously reinforced on the morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.

  This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its creeper-invaded sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was very still in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men. Whatever ants there were at that distance were too small to see.

  ‘All the people have gone,’ said Gerilleau, ‘but we will (do one thing anyhow. We will ’oot and vissel.’

  So Holroyd hooted and whistled.

  Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. ‘Dere is one thing we can do,’ he said presently.

  ‘What’s that?’ said Holroyd.

  ‘’Oot and vissel again.’

  So they did.

  The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to have many things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips. He appeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in Spanish or Portuguese. Holroyd’s improving ear detected something about ammunition. He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English. ‘My dear ’ Olroyd!’ h
e cried, and broke off with ‘But what can one do?’

  They took the boat and the field-glasses, and went close in to examine the place. They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had a certain effect of watching them, dotted about the edge of the rude embarkation jetty. Gerilleau tried ineffectual pistol shots at these. Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious earthworks running between the nearer houses, that may have been the work of the insect conquerors of those human habitations. The explorers pulled past the jetty, and became aware of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and clean and shining, lying beyond. They came to a pause regarding this.…

  ‘I ’ave all dose lives to consider,’ said Gerilleau suddenly.

  Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realizing slowly that he referred to the unappetizing mixture of races that constituted his crew.

  ‘To send a landing party – it is impossible – impossible. They will be poisoned, they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die. It is totally impossible.… If we land, I must land alone, alone, in thick boots and with my life in my hand. Perhaps I should live. Or again – I might not land. I do not know. I do not know.’

  Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.

  ‘De whole thing,’ said Gerilleau suddenly, ‘’as been got up to make me ridiculous. De whole thing!’

  They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from various points of view, and then they returned to the gunboat. Then Gerilleau’s indecisions became terrible. Steam was got up, and in the afternoon the monitor went on up the river with an air of going to ask somebody something, and by sunset came back again and anchored. A thunderstorm gathered and broke furiously, and then the night became beautifully cool and quiet and everyone slept on deck. Except Gerilleau, who tossed about and muttered. In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.

  ‘Lord!’ said Holroyd, ‘what now?’

  ‘I have decided,’ said the captain.

  ‘What – to land?’ said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.

  ‘No!’ said the captain, and was for a time very reserved. ‘I have decided,’ he repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.

  ‘Well, – yes,’ said the captain, ‘I shall fire de big gun!’

  And he did! Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did. He fired it twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had wadding in their ears, and there was an effect of going into action about the whole affair, and first they hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then they smashed the abandoned store behind the jetty. And then Gerilleau experienced the inevitable reaction.

  ‘It is no good,’ he said to Holroyd; ‘no good at all. No sort of bally good. We must go back – for instructions. Dere will be de devil of a row about dis ammunition – oh! de devil of a row! You don’t know, ’Olroyd.…’

  He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.

  ‘But what else was there to do?’ he cried.

  In the afternoon the monitor started downstream again, and in the evening a landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on the bank upon which the new ants have so far not appeared.…

  4

  I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three weeks ago.

  These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back to England with the idea, as he says, of ‘exciting people’ about them ‘before it is too late’. He says they threaten British Guiana, which cannot be much over a trifle of a thousand miles from their present sphere of activity, and that the Colonial Office ought to get to work upon them at once. He declaims with great passion: ‘These are intelligent ants. Just think what that means!’

  There can be no doubt they are a serious pest, and that the Brazilian Government is well advised in offering a prize of five hundred pounds for some effectual method of extirpation. It is certain too that since they first appeared in the hills beyond Badama, about three years ago, they have achieved extraordinary conquests. The whole of the south bank of the Batemo River, for nearly sixty miles, they have in their effectual occupation: they have driven men out completely, occupied plantations and settlements, and boarded and captured at least one ship. It is even said they have in some inexplicable way bridged the very considerable Capuarana arm and pushed many miles towards the Amazon itself. There can be little doubt that they are far more reasonable and with a far better social organization than any previously known ant species; instead of being in dispersed societies they are organized into what is in effect a single nation; but their peculiar and immediate formidableness lies not so much in this as in the intelligent use they make of poison against their larger enemies. It would seem this poison of theirs is closely akin to snake poison, and it is highly probable they actually manufacture it, and that the larger individuals among them carry the needle-like crystals of it in their attacks upon men.

  Of course it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information about these new competitors for the sovereignty of the globe. No eye-witnesses of their activity, except for such glimpses as Holroyd’s, have survived the encounter. The most extraordinary legends of their prowess and capacity are in circulation in the region of the Upper Amazon, and grow daily as the steady advance of the invader stimulates men’s imaginations through their fears. These strange little creatures are credited not only with the use of implements and a knowledge of fire and metals and with organized feats of engineering that stagger our Northern minds – unused as we are to such feats as that of the Saübas of Rio de Janeiro, who in 1841 drove a tunnel under Parahyba where it is as wide as the Thames at London Bridge – but with an organized and detailed method of record and communication analogous to our books. So far their action has been a steady progressive settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of every human being in the new areas they invade. They are increasing rapidly in numbers, and Holroyd at least is firmly convinced that they will finally dispossess man over the whole of tropical South America.

  And why should they stop at tropical South America?

  Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as they are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway,5 and force themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.

  By 1920 they will be halfway down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or ’60 at the latest for the discovery of Europe.

  THE DOOR IN THE WALL

  1

  One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

  He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere; and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it!… It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.’

  Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest, present, convey – I hardly know which word to use – experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

  Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over my intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable privilege or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to guess. Even the facts of his de
ath, which ended my doubts for ever, throw no light on that.

  That much the reader must judge for himself.

  I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a great public movement, in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged suddenly. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘a preoccupation—

  ‘I know,’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I have been negligent. The fact is – it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions – but – it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond – I am haunted. I am haunted by something – that rather takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings…’

  He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. ‘You were at Saint Althelstan’s all through,’ he said, and for a moment that seemed to me quite irrelevant. ‘Well’ – and he paused. Then very haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious and vain to him.

  Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of him – a woman who had loved him greatly. ‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘the interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn’t care a rap for you – under his very nose…’