Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

do you wish us to stay right here and rot?” His voice had grown wretched and powerful. He knew he had to hold the crew to his side or he was lost.
    “I know,” Jennings said surlily. All of a sudden he grinned and began wiping his hands again on his grease-stained engineer’s pants. “The truth is – you done know it already, so why pretend? – the folk I come from – me wife and me mother and me two child – believe I dead,” he said. “Good for them and good for me. I like it right here under the trees. I vote to stop.” He glared at the fateful propeller in the water as if that were the cause of all his trouble.
    Cameron scowled at Jennings. “Shit,” he said. “Let’s move. We got to keep turning. I vote like daSilva to go.” He adopted a belligerent air but he too was heartily uncertain and afraid.
    Carroll had begun laughing and the fresh ringing sound of his voice made everyone forget himself and turn in involuntary surprise. The laugh struck them as the slyest music coming clear out of the stream. It was like a bell and it startled away for one instant every imagined revolution of misery andfear and guile. It was an ingenuous sound like the homely crackle of gossiping parrots or of inspired branches in the leaves, or the slicing ecstasy and abandonment of the laughing wood when the hunter loses and finds his game in the footmark he has himself left and made.
    Carroll laughed because he could not help himself. He saw that the omens and engines of grace and salvation were so easily turned again into doom. He felt – without clearly understanding why – that the entire crew had been drawn together almost against their will it seemed now and that their living desire was ambivalent and confused as the origin of the first command they dimly recalled and knew in the grave of memory. Something had freed them and lifted them up out of the deeps, a blessing and a curse, a reverberating clap of thunder and still music and song. The sound was jubilant and obscure and tremulous in their ear like a dreaming sword that had cut them from the womb.
    Wishrop and Vigilance stood silent listening to the sound of the sword and the bell in the stream. Wishrop was a man of about forty, I dreamed, scanning his features with the deepest attention. A strong aquiline face it was, and still delicate and retiring in mood. I remember how he balanced himself and stood with the promise of a dancer on the prow of the boat when it moved in midstream. He spoke infrequently and as brokenly and whimsically as his labouring companions. His desire for communication was so profound it had broken itself into two parts. One part was a congealed question mark of identity – around which a staccato inner dialogue and labouring monologue was in perpetual evolution and process. The other half was the fluid fascination that everyone and everything exercised upon him – creatures who moved in his consciousness full of the primitive feeling of love purged of all murderous hate and treachery.
    He sought to excuse his deficiency and silence by declaring that he knew better Spanish than English. It was a convenient lie and it carried the ring of truth since he had lived formany years on the Guyana, Venezuela border. A look of unconscious regret and fear would flash when he spoke as if he feared he had already said too much. The crew knew what his guilt signified. He had whispered to them at various half-crazy times that he was dead for the record. He had told them secretly he would be a wanted man now, wanted for murder if it was known he was living. And so he wished to stay dead, he shouted, though he was perfectly alive.
    He was mad they all knew. And yet harmless as a dove. They could not conceive of him as a real murderer. They preferred to accept his story as myth. He was an inspired vessel in whom they poured not only the longing for deathless obedience and constancy (which they read in his half-shadowed face) but the cutting desperate secret