The Comedians Read online

  ‘I never said . . .’

  ‘You want me to keep my eyes open, my ears open?’

  ‘Exactly. No more. If it were anything serious they would surely have asked me to detain him. Perhaps he has run away from his debtors. Who knows? Or some woman business,’ he added with distaste, meeting the gaze of the hard woman with the stony hair.

  ‘Captain, with all respects, I’m not trained to be an informer.’

  ‘I am not asking anything like that, Mr Brown. I cannot very well demand of an old man like Mr Smith . . . in the case of Major Jones . . .’ Again I was aware of the three names, interchangeable like comic masks in a farce. I said, ‘If I see anything that merits a report – I’m not going to look for it, mind.’ The captain gave a little sigh of self-commiseration. ‘As if there were not enough responsibilities for one man on this run . . .’

  He began to tell me a long anecdote about something which had occurred two years before in the port we were coming to. At one in the morning there had been the sounds of shots and half an hour later an officer and two policemen had appeared at the gangway: they wanted to search his ship. Naturally he had refused permission. This was sovereign territory of the Royal Netherlands Steamship Company. There had been a lot of argument. He had complete belief in his night-watchman – wrongly as it turned out, for the man had been asleep at his post. Then on his way to speak to the officer of the watch the captain had noticed a trail of blood spots. It led him to one of the boats and there he had discovered the fugitive.

  ‘What did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘He was attended by the ship’s doctor and then, of course, I handed him over to the proper authorities.’

  ‘Perhaps he was seeking political asylum.’

  ‘I do not know what he was seeking. How could I? He was quite illiterate, and in any case he had no money for his passage.’

  IV

  When I saw Jones again, after the interview with the captain, I felt a prejudice in his favour. If he had asked me to play poker at that moment I would have consented without hesitation and gladly have lost to him, for an exhibition of trust might have removed the bad taste which remained in my mouth. I took the port-side route around the deck to avoid Mr Smith and was slapped with spray; before I could dive down to the cabin I met Mr Jones face to face. I felt guilty, as though I had already betrayed his secret, when he stopped his walk to offer me a drink.

  ‘It’s a bit early,’ I said.

  ‘Opening time in London.’ I looked at my watch – it read five minutes to eleven – and felt as though I were checking his credentials. While he went in search of the steward I picked up the book he had left behind him in the saloon. It was an American paperback with the picture of a naked girl sprawled face down upon a luxurious bed and the title was No Time Like the Present. Inside the cover in pencil was scrawled his signature – H. J. Jones. Was he establishing his identity or reserving this particular book for his personal library? I opened it at random. ‘“Trust?” Geoff’s voice struck her like a whiplash . . .’ And then Jones came back carrying two lagers. I put the book down and said with unnecessary embarrassment, ‘Sortes Virgilianae.’

  ‘Sortes what?’ Jones raised his glass and turning the pages of his mental dictionary and perhaps rejecting ‘mud in your eye’ as obsolete brought out a more modern term, ‘Cheers.’ He added after a swallow, ‘I saw you talking to the captain just now.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘An unapproachable old bastard. He’ll talk only to the toffs.’ The word had an antique flavour: this time his dictionary had certainly failed him.

  ‘I wouldn’t call myself a toff.’

  ‘You mustn’t mind me saying that. Toff has a special sense for me. I divide the world into two parts – the toffs and the tarts. The toffs can do without the tarts, but the tarts can’t do without the toffs. I’m a tart.’

  ‘What exactly is your idea of a tart? It seems to be a bit special too.’

  ‘The toffs have a settled job or a good income. They have a stake somewhere like you have in your hotel. The tarts – well, we pick a living here and there – in saloon bars. We keep our ears open and our eyes skinned.’

  ‘You live on your wits, is that it?’

  ‘Or we die on them often enough.’

  ‘And the toffs – haven’t they any wits?’

  ‘They don’t need wits. They have reason, intelligence, character. We tarts – we sometimes go too fast for our own good.’

  ‘And the other passengers – are they tarts or toffs?’

  ‘I can’t make out Mr Fernandez. He might be either. And the chemist chap, he’s given us no opportunity to judge. But Mr Smith – he’s a real toff if ever there was one.’

  ‘You sound as though you admire the toffs?’

  ‘We’d all like to be toffs, and aren’t there moments – admit it, old man – when you envy the tarts? Sometimes when you don’t want to sit down with your accountant and see too far ahead?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose there are moments like that.’

  ‘You think to yourself. “We have the responsibility, but they have all the fun.”’

  ‘I hope you’ll find some fun where you are going. It’s a country of tarts all right – from the President downwards.’

  ‘That’s one danger the more for me. A tart can spot a tart. Perhaps I’ll have to play a toff to put them off their guard. I ought to study Mr Smith.’

  ‘Have you often had to play a toff?’

  ‘Not too often, thank the Lord. It’s the hardest part of all for me. I find myself laughing at the wrong moment. What, me, Jones, in that company, saying that? I get scared sometimes too. I lose the way. It’s frightening to be lost, isn’t it, in a strange city, but when you get lost inside yourself . . . Have another lager.’

  ‘This one’s mine.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m right about you. Seeing you there . . . with the captain . . . I looked through the windows as I went by . . . you didn’t look exactly at your ease . . . you aren’t a tart by any chance pretending to be a toff?’

  ‘Does one always know oneself?’ The steward came in and began to distribute the ash-trays. ‘Two more lagers,’ I told him.

  ‘Would you mind,’ Jones said, ‘if I made it a Bols this time. I get blown up and sort of windy with too much lager.’

  ‘Two Bols,’ I said.

  ‘Do you ever play at cards?’ he asked, and I thought that after all the moment had come to purge my guilt; all the same I replied with caution, ‘Poker?’

  He was too frank to be true. Why had he talked to me so openly about the toffs and the tarts? I got the impression that he guessed what the captain had said to me and was testing my reaction, dropping his candour into the current of my thoughts to see if it changed colour like a piece of litmus-paper. Perhaps he thought that my allegiance in the last event would not necessarily be to the toffs. Or perhaps my name Brown had sounded to him as phoney as his own.

  ‘I don’t play poker,’ he retorted and twinkled his black eyes at me as much as to say, ‘I’ve caught you there.’ He said, ‘I always give away too much. In friendly company. I haven’t got the knack of hiding what I feel. Gin-rummy’s my only game.’ He pronounced the title as though it were a nursery game – a mark of innocence. ‘You play it?’

  ‘I’ve played it once or twice,’ I said.

  ‘I’m not pressing you. I just thought it might pass the time till lunch.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Steward, the cards.’ He gave me a little smile as much as to say, ‘You see, I don’t carry my own marked packs.’

  It really was, in its way, a game of innocence. There was no easy means of cheating. He asked, ‘What shall we play? Ten cents a hundred?’

  Jones brought to the game his own special quality. He noticed first, he told me later, in what part of his hand an inexperienced opponent kept his discards and by that means he judged how near he was to a gin. He knew by the way his opponent arranged his cards, by the length of his hesitat
ion before playing, whether they were good, bad or indifferent, and if the hand were obviously good he would often propose fresh cards in the certainty of refusal. This gave his opponent a sense of superiority and of security, so that he would be inclined to take risks, to play on too long in the hope of a grand gin. Even the speed with which his opponent took a card and threw one down told him much. ‘Psychology will always beat mere mathematics,’ he said to me once, and it was certain that he beat me nearly always. I had to have a hand ready made to win.

  He was six dollars up when the gong went for lunch. That was about the measure of the success he wanted, a modest win, so that no opponent ever refused him the chance to play again. Sixty dollars a week is not a big income, but he told me that he could depend on it, and it kept him in cigarettes and drink. And of course there were the occasional coups: sometimes an opponent despised so childlike a game and insisted on fifty cents a point. Once in Port-au-Prince I was to see that happen. If Jones had lost I doubt whether he could have paid, but fortune even in the twentieth century does sometimes favour the brave. The man was capot in two columns and Jones rose from the table two thousand dollars the richer. Even then he was moderate in victory. He offered his opponent his revenge and lost five hundred and a few odd dollars. ‘There’s another thing,’ he once revealed to me, ‘women as a rule won’t play you at poker. Their husbands don’t like it – it has a loose and dangerous air. But gin-rummy at ten cents a hundred – it’s only pin-money. And of course it increases one’s range of players quite a lot.’ Even Mrs Smith, who would have turned away, I am sure, with disapproval from a game of poker, sometimes came and watched our contests.

  That day at lunch – I don’t know how the conversation arose – we got on the subject of war. I think it was the pharmaceutical traveller who began it; he had been, he said, a warden in civil defence and he had an urge to recount the usual bomb-stories, as obsessive and boring as other men’s dreams. Mr Smith sat with a fixed mask of polite attention and Mrs Smith fidgeted with her fork, while the chemist went on and on about the bombing of a Jewish girls’ hostel in Store Street (‘We were so busy that night no one noticed it had gone’) until Jones broke brutally in with, ‘I lost a whole platoon myself once.’

  ‘How did that happen?’ I asked, glad to encourage Jones.

  ‘I never knew,’ he said. ‘No one came back to tell the tale.’

  The poor chemist sat with his mouth a little open. He was only half way through his own story and he had no audience left: he resembled a sea-lion which has dropped its fish. Mr Fernandez took another helping of smoked herring. He was the only one who showed no interest in Jones’s story. Even Mr Smith was intrigued enough to say, ‘Tell us a little more, Mr Jones.’ I noticed that we were all reluctant to give him a military title.

  ‘It was in Burma,’ Jones said. ‘We had been dropped behind the Jap lines to make a diversion. This particular platoon lost touch with my H.Q. There was a youngster in command – he wasn’t properly trained in jungle fighting. Of course in those conditions it’s always sauve qui peut. Strangely enough I didn’t have a single other casualty – just that one complete platoon, nipped off our strength like that,’ he broke off a portion of bread and swallowed it. ‘No prisoners ever came back.’

  ‘Were you one of Wingate’s men?’ I asked.

  ‘The same kind of outfit,’ he replied with his recurrent ambiguity.

  ‘You spent a lot of time in the jungle?’ the purser asked.

  ‘Oh well, I had a kind of knack for it,’ Jones said. He added with modesty, ‘I’d have been no good in the desert. I had a reputation, you know, for being able to smell water like a native.’

  ‘That might have been useful in the desert too,’ I said, and he gave me a look across the table dark with reproach.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Mr Smith said, pushing away what was left of his cutlet – a nut-cutlet, of course, specially prepared, ‘that so much courage and skill can be spent in killing our fellow-men.’

  ‘As Presidential Candidate,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘my husband had the support of conscientious objectors throughout the state.’

  ‘Were none of them meat-eaters?’ I asked, and it was the turn now of Mrs Smith to regard me with disappointment.

  ‘No laughing matter,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a fair question, dear,’ Mr Smith gently reproved her. ‘But it isn’t so strange, Mr Brown, when you think of it, that vegetarianism and conscientious objection should go together. I was telling you the other day about acidity and what effect it has on the passions. Eliminate acidity and you give a kind of elbow-room to the conscience. And the conscience, well, it wants to grow and grow and grow. So one day you refuse to have an innocent animal butchered for your pleasure, and the next – it takes you by surprise, perhaps, but you turn away in horror from killing a fellow-man. And then comes the colour question and Cuba . . . I can tell you I had the support of many theosophist groups as well.’

  ‘The Anti-Blood Sports League too,’ Mrs Smith said. ‘Not officially, of course, as a League. But many members voted for Mr Smith.’

  ‘With so much support . . .’ I began, ‘I’m surprised . . .’

  ‘The progressives will always be in a minority,’ Mrs Smith said, ‘in our lifetime, but at least we made our protest.’

  And then of course the usual wearisome wrangle began. The traveller in pharmaceutical products started it – I would like to give him capital initials like those of the Presidential Candidate, for he seemed truly representative, but in his case of a baser world. As a former air-raid warden he regarded himself as a combatant. Besides, he had a grievance; his bomb reminiscences had been interrupted. ‘I can’t understand pacifists,’ he said, ‘they consent to be protected by men like us . . .’

  ‘You do not consult us,’ Mr Smith gently corrected him.

  ‘It’s hard for most of us to distinguish between a conscientious objector and a shirker.’

  ‘At least they do not shirk prison,’ Mr Smith said.

  Jones came unexpectedly to his support. ‘Many served very gallantly in the Red Cross,’ he said. ‘Some of us owe our lives to them.’

  ‘You won’t find many pacifists where you are going,’ the purser said.

  The chemist persisted, his voice high with his own grievance, ‘And what if someone attacks your wife, what then?’

  The Presidential Candidate stared down the length of the table at the stout pale unhealthy traveller and addressed him as though he were a heckler at a political meeting, with weight and gravity. ‘I have never claimed, sir, that with removal of acidity we remove all passion. If Mrs Smith were attacked and I had a weapon in my hand, I cannot promise that I would not use it. We have standards to which we do not always rise.’

  ‘Bravo, Mr Smith,’ Jones cried.

  ‘But I would deplore my passion, sir. I would deplore it.’

  V

  That evening I went to the purser’s cabin before dinner, I forget on what errand. I found him seated at his desk. He was blowing up a French letter till it was the size of a policeman’s truncheon. He tied the end up with ribbon and removed it from his mouth. His desk was littered with great swollen phalluses. It was like a massacre of pigs.

  ‘Tomorrow is the ship’s concert,’ he explained to me, ‘and we have no balloons. It was Mr Jones’s idea that we should use these.’ I saw that he had decorated some of the sheaths with comic faces in coloured ink. ‘We have only one lady on board,’ he said, ‘and I do not think she will realize the nature . . .’

  ‘You forget she is a progressive.’

  ‘In that case she will not mind. These are surely the symbols of progress.’

  ‘Suffering as we do from acidity, at least we need not pass it on to our children.’

  He giggled and set to work with a coloured crayon on one of his monstrous faces. The texture of the skin whined under his fingers.

  ‘What time, do you think, we’ll arrive on Wednesday?’

  ‘The captai
n expects to tie up by the early evening.’

  ‘I hope we get in before the lights go out. I suppose they still go out?’

  ‘Yes. You will find nothing has changed for the better. Only for the worse. It is impossible to leave the city now without a police-permit. There are barricades on every road out of Port-au-Prince. I doubt if you will be able to reach your hotel without being searched. We have warned the crew that they leave the harbour only at their own risk. Of course they will go just the same. Mère Catherine will always stay open.’

  ‘Any news of the Baron?’ It was the name some gave to the President as an alternative to Papa Doc – we dignified his shambling shabby figure with the title of Baron Samedi, who in the Voodoo mythology haunts the cemeteries in his top-hat and tails, smoking his big cigar.

  ‘They say he hasn’t been seen for three months. He doesn’t even come to a window of the palace to watch the band. He might be dead for all anyone knows. If he can die without a silver bullet. We’ve had to cancel our call at Cap Haïtien the last two trips. The town is under martial law. It’s too close to the Dominican border, and we aren’t allowed in.’ He drew a deep breath and began to inflate another French letter. The teat stood out like a tumour on the skull, and a hospital smell of rubber filled the cabin. He said, ‘What makes you go back?’

  ‘One can’t just leave a hotel one owns . . .’

  ‘But you did leave it.’

  I wasn’t going to confide my reasons to the purser. They were too private and too serious, if one can describe as serious the confused comedy of our lives. He blew up another capote anglaise, and I thought: Surely there must be a power which always arranges things to happen in the most humiliating circumstances. When I was a boy I had faith in the Christian God. Life under his shadow was a very serious affair; I saw Him incarnated in every tragedy. He belonged to the lacrimae rerum like a gigantic figure looming through a Scottish mist. Now that I approached the end of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe in Him. Life was a comedy, not the tragedy for which I had been prepared, and it seemed to me that we were all, on this boat with a Greek name (why should a Dutch line name its boats in Greek?), driven by an authoritative practical joker towards the extreme point of comedy. How often, in the crowd on Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway, after the theatres closed, have I heard the phrase – ‘I laughed till the tears came.’