If I describe this ignoble little town in such detail, it is because it was the scene of a long dialogue I held with myself which was interrupted only by a surprising encounter. I had begun, as I passed the first hairdresser, to think of Miss Keene and her letter of shy appeal which surely deserved a better response than my brief telegram, and then in this humid place, where the only serious business or entertainment was certainly crime, and even the national bank had to be defended on a Sunday afternoon by a guard with an automatic rifle, I thought of my home in Southwood, of my garden, of Major Charge trumpeting across the fence, and of the sweet sound of the bells from Church Road. But I remembered Southwood now with a kind of friendly tolerance as the place which Miss Keene should never have left, the place where Miss Keene was happy, the place where I myself no longer belonged. It was as though I had escaped from an open prison, had been snatched away, provided with a rope ladder and a waiting car, into my aunts world, the world of the unexpected character and the unforeseen event. There the rabbit-faced smuggler was at home, the Czech with his two million plastic straws, and poor OToole busy making a record of his urine.
I passed the end of a street called Rua Dean Furnes which petered away like all the others into no-mans-land, and I stayed a moment outside the governors house, which was painted with a pink wash. On the veranda were two unoccupied chaises-longues[250] and the windows were wide open on an empty room with a portrait of a military man, the President, I suppose, and a row of empty chairs lined up against the wall like a firing squad. The sentry made a small movement with his automatic rifle and I moved on towards the national bank, where another sentry made the same warning movement when I paused.
That morning in my bunk I had read Wordsworths great ode in Palgraves Golden Treasury. Palgrave, like Scott, carried signs of my fathers reading in the form of dog-eared pages, and knowing so little about him, I had followed every clue and so learned to enjoy what he had enjoyed. Thus when I first entered the bank as junior clerk I had thought of it in Wordsworths terms as a prison-house what was it my father had found a prison, so that he double-marked the passage? Perhaps our home, and my stepmother and I had been the warders.
Ones life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand[251]. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my fathers library had not contained the right books. (I dont think there was much passionate love in Marion Crawford, and only a shadow of it in Walter Scott.)
I can remember very little of the vision preceding the prison-house: it must have faded very early into the light of common day, but it seemed to me, as I put Palgrave down beside my bunk and thought of my aunt, that she for one had never allowed the vision to fade. Perhaps a sense of morality is the sad compensation we learn to enjoy, like a remission for good conduct. In the vision there is no morality. I had been born as a result of what my stepmother would have called an immoral act, an act of darkness. I had begun in immoral freedom. Why then should I have found myself in a prison-house? My real mother had certainly not been imprisoned anywhere.
Its too late now, I said to Miss Keene, signalling to me desperately from Koffiefontein, Im no longer there, where you think I am. Perhaps we might have comforted ourselves once and been content in our prison cell, but Im not the same man you regarded with a touch of tenderness over the tatting. I have escaped. I dont resemble whatever identikit portrait you have of me. I walked back towards the landing stage, and looking behind me, I saw the canine skeleton on my tracks. I suppose to that dog any stranger represented hope.
Hi, man, a voice called. You in number-one hurry?[252] and Wordsworth was suddenly there a few yards away. He had risen from a bench beside the bust of the liberator Urquiza and advanced towards me with both hands out and his face slashed open with the wide wound of his grin. Man, you not forget old Wordsworth? he asked, wringing both my hands, and laughing so loudly and deeply that he sprayed my face with his happiness.
Why, Wordsworth, I said with equal pleasure, what on earth are you doing here?
My lil bebi gel, he said, she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr. Pullen come.
I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.
Why, Wordsworth, I said with equal pleasure, what on earth are you doing here?
My lil bebi gel, he said, she tell me go off Formosa and wait for Mr. Pullen come.
I noticed that he was every bit as smartly dressed now as the rabbit-nosed importer and he too carried a very new suitcase.