Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [80]
"The wheels within wheels this is."
"I deeply sympathize. Now then, we're all set. Stand still."
"How on earth can I stand still?"
"Perhaps you'd better sit down."
But the Consul could not sit down either.
"Jesus, Hugh, I'm sorry. I can't stop bouncing about. It's like being in a tank--did I say tank? Christ, I need a drink. What have we here?" The Consul grasped, from the window-sill, an uncorked bottle of bay rum. "What's this like, do you suppose, eh? For the scalp." Before Hugh could stop him the Consul took a large drink. "Not bad. Not at all bad," he added triumphantly, smacking his lips. "If slightly underproof... Like pernod, a little. A charm against galloping cockroaches anyway. And the polygonous proustian stare of imaginary scorpions. Wait a minute, I'm going to be--"
Hugh let the taps run loudly. Next door he heard Yvonne moving about, getting ready to go to Tomalín. But he'd left the radio playing on the porch; probably she could hear no more than the usual bathroom babel.
"Tit for tat," the Consul, still trembling, commented, when Hugh had assisted him back to his chair. "I did that for you once."
"Sí, hombre! Hugh, lathering the brush again on the asses'-milk soap, raised his eyebrows. "Quite so. Better now, old fellow?"
"When you were an infant," the Consul's teeth chattered. "On the P. O. boat coming back from India... The old Cocanada'
Hugh resettled the towel around his brother's neck, then, as if absent-mindedly obeying the other's wordless instructions, went out, humming, through the bedroom back to the porch, where the radio was now stupidly playing Beethoven in the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whisky bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly--in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying--on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection: Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda--God knows, Peter Rabbit; "Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit," the Consul liked to say--Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured himself a stiff drink into a tooth mug. "Wherever did you find that?--ah!... You've saved my life!"
"That's nothing. I did the same for Carruthers once." Hugh now set about shaving the Consul who had become much steadier almost immediately.
"Carruthers--the Old Crow?... Did what for Carruthers?"
"Held his head."
"He wasn't tight of course, though."
"Not tight... Submerged. In a supervision too." Hugh flourished the cut-throat razor. "Try and sit still like that; you're doing fine. He had a great respect for you--he had an enormous number of stories about you, mostly variations on the same one... however. The one about your riding into college on a horse--"
"Oh no... I wouldn't have ridden it in. Anything bigger than a sheep frightens me."
"Anyway there the horse was, tied up in the buttery. A pretty ferocious horse too. Apparently it took about thirty-seven gyps and the college porter to get it out."
"Good lord... But I can't imagine Carruthers ever getting so tight he'd pass out at a supervision. Let me see, he was only praelector in my time. I believe he was really more interested in his first editions than in us. Of course it was at the beginning of the war, a rather trying period... But he was a wonderful old chap."