Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Read Free Book Online

Without knowing quite why M. Laruelle
felt he might have actually proved a great force for good. But Sr Bustamente
had never said he was a coward. Almost reverently Sr Bustamente pointed out
that being a coward and afraid for one's life were two different things in
Mexico. And certainly the Consul was not vicious but an hombre noble. Yet might
not just such a character and distinguished record as M. Laruelle claimed was
his have precisely qualified him for the excessively dangerous activities of a
spider? It seemed useless to try and explain to Sr Bustamente that the poor
Consul's job was merely a retreat, that while he had intended originally to
enter the Indian Civil Service, he had in fact entered the Diplomatic Service
only for one reason and another to be kicked downstairs into ever remoter
consulships, and finally into the sinecure in Quauhnahuac as a position where
he was least likely to prove a nuisance to the Empire, in which, with one part
of his mind at least, M. Laruelle suspected he so passionately believed.
    But why had all this happened? he
asked himself now. ¿Quién sabe? He risked another anís, and at the first sip a
scene, probably rather inaccurate (M. Laruelle had been in the artillery during
the last war, survived by him in spite of Guillaume Apollinaire's being for a
time his commanding officer), was conjured to his mind. A dead calm on the
line, but the S.S. Samaritan, if she should have been on the line, was actually
far north of it. Indeed for a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New
South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram she had for
some time been steering a rather odd course. Why, for instance, had she emerged
into the Pacific Ocean out of the Bungo Strait in Japan south of Shikoku and
not far from the East China Sea? For days now, not unlike a stray sheep on the
immeasurable green meadows of waters, she had been keeping an offing from
various interesting islands far out of her path. Lot's Wife and Arzobispo.
Rosario and Sulphur Island. Volcano Island and St Augustine. It was somewhere
between Guy Rock and the Euphrosyne Reef that she first sighted the periscope
and sent her engines full speed astern. But when the submarine surfaced she
hove to. An unarmed merchantman, the Samaritan put up no fight. Before the
boarding party from the submarine reached her, however, she suddenly changed
her temper. As if by magic the sheep turned to a dragon belching fire. The
U-boat did not even have time to dive. Her entire crew was captured. The
Samaritan, who had lost her captain in the engagement, sailed on, leaving the
submarine burning helplessly, a smoking cigar a-glow on the vast surface of the
Pacific.
    And in some capacity obscure to M.
Laruelle--for Geoffrey had not been in the merchant service but, arrived via
the yacht club and something in salvage, a naval lieutenant, or God knows
perhaps by that time a lieutenant-commander--the Consul had been largely
responsible for this escapade. And for it, or gallantry connected with it, he
had received the British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.
    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