Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [15]
But there was a slight hitch apparently. For whereas the submarine's crew became prisoners of war when the Samaritan (which was only one of the ship's names, albeit that the Consul liked best) reached port, mysteriously none of her officers was among them. Something had happened to those German officers, and what had happened was not pretty. They had, it was said, been kidnapped by the Samaritan's stokers and burned alive in the furnaces.
M. Laruelle thought of this. The Consul loved England and as a young man may have subscribed--though it was doubtful, this being rather more in those days the prerogative of non-combatants--to the popular hatred of the enemy. But he was a man of honour and probably no one supposed for a moment he had ordered the Samaritan's stokers to put the Germans in the furnace. None dreamed that such an order given would have been obeyed. But the fact remained the Germans had been put there and it was no use saying that was the best place for them. Someone must take the blame.
So the Consul had not received his decoration without first being court-martialled. He was acquitted. It was not at all clear to M. Laruelle why he and no one else should have been tried. Yet it was easy to think of the Consul as a kind of more lachrymose pseudo "Lord Jim" living in a self-imposed exile, brooding, despite his award, over his lost honour, his secret, and imagining that a stigma would cling to him because of it throughout his whole life. Yet this was far from the case. No stigma clung to him evidently. And he had shown no reluctance in discussing the incident with M. Laruelle, who years before had read a guarded article concerning it in the Paris-Soir. He had even been enormously funny about it. "People simply did not go round," he said, "putting Germans in furnaces! It was only once or twice during those later months when drunk that to M. Laruelle's astonishment he suddenly began proclaiming not only his guilt in the matter but that he'd always suffered horribly on account of it. He went much further. No blame attached to the stokers. No question arose of any order given them. Flexing his muscles he sardonically announced the single-handed accomplishment himself of the deed. But by this time the poor Consul had already lost almost all capacity for telling the truth and his life had become a quixotic oral fiction. Unlike "Jim" he had grown rather careless of his honour and the German officers were merely an excuse to buy another bottle of mescal. M. Laruelle told the Consul as much, and they quarrelled grotesquely, becoming estranged again--when bitterer things had not estranged them--and remained so till the last--indeed at the very last it had been wickedly, sorrowfully worse than ever--as years before at Leasowe.
Then will I headlong fly into the earth:
Earth, gape! it will not harbour me!
M. Laruelle had opened the book of Elizabethan plays at random and for a moment he sat oblivious of his surroundings, gazing at the words that seemed to have the power of carrying his own mind downward into a gulf, as in fulfilment on his own spirit of the threat Marlowe's Faustus had cast at his despair. Only Faustus had not said quite that. He looked more closely at the passage. Faustus had said: "Then will I headlong run into the earth," and "O, no, it will not--" That was not so bad. Under the circumstances to run was not so bad as to fly. Intaglioed in the maroon leather cover of the book was a golden faceless figurine also running, carrying a torch like the elongated neck and head and open beak of the sacred ibis. M. Laruelle sighed, ashamed of himself. What had produced the illusion, the elusive flickering candlelight, coupled with the dim, though now less dim, electric light, or some correspondence, maybe, as Geoff liked to put it, between the subnormal world and the abnormally suspicious? How the Consul had delighted in the absurd game too: sortes Shakespeareanae... And what wonders I have done all Germany can witness. Enter Wagner, solus... Ick sal you wat suggen, Hans. Dis skip, dat comen from Candy, is als vol, by God's sacrament, van sugar, almonds, cambrick, end alle dingen, towsand, towsand ding. M. Laruelle closed the book on Dekker's comedy, then, in the face of the barman who was watching him, stained dishcloth over his arm, with quiet amazement, shut his eyes, and opening the book again twirled one finger in the air, and brought it down firmly upon a passage he now held up to the light: