Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [43]
"I'm sure Hugh'd understand--"
"But that's not quite the point!"
"Geoffrey, this house has become somehow evil--"
"--I mean it's rather a dirty trick--"
Oh Jesus... The Consul slowly assumed an expression intended to be slightly bantering and at the same time assured, indicative of a final consular sanity. For this was it. Goethe's church bell was looking him straight between the eyes; fortunately, he was prepared for it. "I remember a fellow I helped out in New York once," he was saying with apparent irrelevance, "in some way, an out of work actor he was. 'Why Mr Firmin,' he said, 'it isn't naturel here.' That's exactly how he pronounced it: naturel. "Man wasn't intended for it,' he complained. 'All the streets are the same as this Tenth or Eleventh Street in Philadelphia too...'" The Consul could feel his English accent leaving him and that of a Bleecker Street mummer taking its place. "'But in Newcastle, Delaware, now that's another thing again! Old cobbled roads... And Charleston: old Southern stuff... But oh my God this city--the noise! the chaos! If I could only get out! If only I knew where you could get to!'" The Consul concluded with passion, with anguish, his voice quivering--though as it happened he had never met any such person, and the whole story had been told him by Tom, he shook violently with the emotion of the poor actor.
"What's the use of escaping," he drew the moral with complete seriousness, "from ourselves?"
Yvonne had sunk back in bed patiently. But now she stretched forward and stabbed out her cigarette in the tray of a tall grey tin-work ashstand shaped like an abstract representation of a swan. The swan's neck had become slightly unravelled but it bowed gracefully, tremulously at her touch as she answered:
"All right, Geoffrey: suppose we forget it until you're feeling better: we can cope with it in a day or two, when you're sober."
"But good lord!"
The Consul sat perfectly still staring at the floor while the enormity of the insult passed into his soul. As if, as if, he were not sober now! Yet there was some elusive subtlety in the impeachment that still escaped him. For he was not sober. No, he was not, not at this very moment he wasn't! But what had that to do with a minute before, or half an hour ago? And what right had Yvonne to assume it, assume either that he was not sober now, or that, far worse, in a day or two he would be sober? And even if he were not sober now, by what fabulous stages, comparable indeed only to the paths and spheres of the Holy Cabbala itself, had he reached this stage again, touched briefly once before this morning, this stage at which alone he could, as she put it, "cope," this precarious precious stage, so arduous to maintain, of being drunk in which alone he was sober! What right had she, when he had sat suffering the tortures of the damned and the madhouse on her behalf for fully twenty-five minutes on end without having a decent drink, even to hint that he was anything but, to her eyes, sober? Ah, a woman could not know the perils, the complications, yes, the importance of a drunkard's life! From what conceivable standpoint of rectitude did she imagine she could judge what was anterior to her arrival? And she knew nothing whatever of what all too recently he had gone through, his fall in the Calle Nicaragua, his aplomb, coolness, even bravery there--the Burke's Irish whiskey! What a world! And the trouble was she had now spoiled the moment. Because the Consul now felt that he might have been capable, remembering Yvonne's "perhaps I'll have one after breakfast," and all that implied, of saying, in a minute (but for her remark and yes, in spite of any salvation), "Yes, by all means you are right: let us go!" But who could agree