Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [87]
It was dead serious. Hugh was horribly ashamed of ever having so exploited it. Years of crashing dullness, of exposure to every kind of obscure peril and disease, your destiny at the mercy of a company interested in your health only because it might have to pay your insurance, your home-life reduced to a hip-bath with your wife on the kitchen mat every eighteen months, that was the sea. That, and a secret longing to be buried in it. And an enormous unquenchable pride. Hugh now thought he realized dimly what the lamp-trimmer had tried to explain, why he had been alternately abused and toadied to on the Philoctetes.
It was largely because he had foolishly advertised himself as the representative of a heartless system both distrusted and feared.
Yet to seamen this system offers far greater inducement than to firemen, who rarely emerge through the hawsehole into the bourgeois upper air. Nevertheless, it remains suspect. Its ways are devious. Its spies are everywhere. It will wheedle to you, who can tell, even on a guitar. For this reason its diary must be read. One must check up, keep abreast of its deviltries. One must, if necessary, flatter it, ape it, seem to collaborate with it.
And it, in turn, flatters you. It yields a point here and there, in matters such as food, better living conditions, even though it has first destroyed the peace of mind necessary to benefit by them, libraries. For in this manner it keeps a stranglehold on your soul. And because of this it sometimes happens you grow obsequious and find yourself saying: "Do you know, you are working for us, when we should be working for you?" That is right too.
The system is working for you, as you will shortly discover, when the next war comes, bringing jobs for all. "But don't imagine you can get away with these tricks for ever," you are repeating all the time in your heart; "Actually we have you in our grip. Without us in peace or war Christendom must collapse like a heap of ashes!" Hugh saw holes in the logic of this thought. Nevertheless, on board the Oedipus Tyrannus, almost without taint of that symbol, Hugh had been neither abused nor toadied to. He had been treated as a comrade. And generously helped, when unequal to his task. Only four weeks. Yet those weeks with the Oedipus Tyrannus had reconciled him to the Philoctetes. Thus he became bitterly concerned that so long as he stayed sick someone else must do his job. When he turned to again before he was well he still dreamed of England and fame. But he was mainly occupied with finishing his work in style. During these last hard weeks he played his guitar seldom. It seemed he was getting along splendidly. So splendidly that, before docking, his shipmates insisted on packing his bag for him. As it turned out, with stale bread.
They lay at Gravesend waiting for the tide. Around them in the misty dawn sheep were already bleating softly. The Thames, in the half-light, seemed not unlike the Yangtze-Kiang. Then, suddenly, someone knocked out his pipe on a garden wall...
Hugh hadn't waited to discover whether the journalist who came aboard at Silvertown liked to play his songs in his spare time. He'd almost thrown him bodily off the ship.
Whatever prompted the ungenerous act did not prevent his somehow finding his way that night to New Compton Street and Bolowski's shabby little shop. Closed now and dark: but Hugh could almost be certain those were his songs in the window. How strange it all was! Almost he fancied he heard familiar chords from above--Mrs Bolowski practising them softly in an upper room. And later, seeking a hotel, that all around him people were humming them. That night too, in the Astoria, this humming persisted in his dreams; he rose at dawn to investigate once more the wonderful window. Neither of his songs was there. Hugh was only disappointed an instant. Probably his songs were so popular no copies could be spared for display.
Nine