Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Read Free Book Online Page A

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:
    Cut is the branch that might have
grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough,
That sometimes grew within this learned man,
Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall—
Shaken, M. Laruelle replaced the book on the table, closing it with the fingers
and thumb of one hand, while with the other hand he reached to the floor for