Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [82]
"God how funny... Or isn't it? The poor Old Crow."
"He was a marvellous fellow." "The best."
(... I have played the guitar before the Prince of Wales, begged in the streets with one for ex-servicemen on Armistice Day, performed at a reception given by the Amundsen society, and to a caucus of the French Chamber of Deputies as they arranged the approaching years. The Three Able Seamen achieved meteoric fame, Metronome compared us to Venuti's Blue Four. Once the worst possible thing that could befall me seemed some hand injury. Nevertheless one dreamed frequently of dying, bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar, strumming to the end... Yet I stopped of my own accord. Suddenly, less than a year after going down from Cambridge, stopped, first in bands, then playing it intimately, stopped so completely that Yvonne, despite the tenuous bond of being born in Hawaii, doubtless doesn't know I ever played, so emphatically no one says any longer: Hugh, where's your guitar? Come on and give us a tune--)
"I have," the Consul said, "a slight confession to make, Hugh... I cheated a little on the strychnine while you were away."
"Thalavethiparothiam, is it?" Hugh observed, pleasantly menacing. "Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don't be careful, as the Mexicans say, I'm going to shave the back of your neck."
But first Hugh wiped the razor with some tissue paper, glancing absently through the door into the Consul's room. The bedroom windows were wide open; the curtains blew inward very gently. The wind had almost dropped. The scents of the garden were heavy about them. Hugh heard the wind starting to blow again on the other side of the house, the fierce breath of the Atlantic, flavoured with wild Beethoven. But here, on the leeward side, those trees one could see through the bathroom window seemed unaware of it. And the curtains were engaged with their own gentle breeze. Like the crew's washing on board a tramp steamer, strung over number six hatch between sleek derricks lying in grooves, that barely dances in the afternoon sunlight, while abaft the beam not a league away some pitching native craft with violently flapping sails seems wrestling a hurricane, they swayed imperceptibly, as to another control...
(Why did I stop playing the guitar? Certainly not because, belatedly, one had come to see the point of Phillipson's picture, the cruel truth it contained... They are losing the Battle of the Ebro--And yet, one might well have seen one's continuing to play as but another form of publicity stunt, a means of keeping oneself in the limelight, as if those weekly articles for the News of the World were not limelight enough! Or myself with the thing destined to be some kind of incurable "love-object," or eternal troubadour, jongleur, interested only in married women--why?--incapable finally of love altogether... Bloody little man. Who, anyhow, no longer wrote songs. While the guitar as an end in itself at least seemed simply futile; no longer even fun--certainly a childish thing to be put away--)
"Is that right?"
"Is what right?"
"Do you see that poor exiled maple tree outside there," asked the Consul, "propped up with those crutches of cedar?"
"No--luckily for you--"
"One of these days, when the wind blows from the other direction, it's going to collapse." The Consul spoke haltingly while Hugh shaved his neck. "And do you see that sunflower looking in through the bedroom window? It stares into my room all day."
"It strolled into your room, do you say?"
"Stares. Fiercely. All day. Like God!"
(The last time I played it... Strumming in the King of Bohemia, London. Benskin's Fine Ales and Stouts. And waking, after passing out, to find John and the rest singing unaccompanied that song about the balgine run. What, anyhow, is a balgine run? Revolutionary songs; bogus bolshy;--but why had one never heard such songs before? Or, for that matter, in England, seen such rich spontaneous enjoyment in singing? Perhaps because at any given gathering, one had always been singing oneself. Sordid songs: I Ain't Got Nobody. Loveless songs: The One That I Love Loves Me... Though John "and the rest" were not, to one's own experience at least, bogus: no more than who, at sunset walking with the crowd, or receiving bad news, witnessing injustice, once turned and thought, did not believe, turned back and questioned, decided to act... They are winning the Battle of the Ebro! Not for me, perhaps. Yet no wonder indeed if these friends, some of whom now lie dead on Spanish soil, had, as I then understood, really been bored by my pseudo-American twanging, not even good twanging finally, and had only been listening out of politeness--twanging--)