Читать книгу Mr. Smith - Louis Bromfield - Страница 5

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The hut in which I am writing is constructed of corrugated iron, about twelve by fifteen feet in size. At first it had a roof of corrugated iron but the heat became intolerable and the Sergeant and I covered it over with plantain leaves thatched together thickly in an amateur way. It keeps out the rain, until it rots, which everything does very quickly here (even men’s minds and bodies), and it is much cooler now. The boys have done the same thing to their own huts. It appears that back in Washington it has never occurred to the Army bureaucrats that iron absorbs heat and that in the tropics it is scarcely a material suitable for roofing. Perhaps one of these days an inspecting officer will visit us, make a great row and insist that we remove the plantain leaves and restore the corrugated iron because plantain leaves are not “regulation.” The roof has a life of its own for it was scarcely finished before it became inhabited by every sort of rodent, spider, lizard and centipede. Living their own nocturnal lives, there is a perpetual sound of rustling throughout the damp nights.

In my hut I have an Army cot, a crude wooden table, two homemade chairs, a typewriter, an enameled wash basin and some books. It is simple enough. Many might consider my home lacking in comfort and constricted in size, but to me it is a kind of paradise. In it I live alone. It is all mine. I share it with no one save when the Sergeant or one of the boys comes in to talk, which is seldom enough. And when they do come in, I find for the first time in my life that I know a man and can talk to him. In a place like this there is little to hide and small reason to hide anything. It is extraordinary how frank and honest our conversations can be and even at times how sympathetic and understanding. I think that is because all of us, save Homer, the wool-hat, feel that we are lost and abandoned and that all the conventions, the restrictions, the hypocrisies of ordinary everyday life back home have no place or meaning here in this primitive world. We are all in the same boat.

Meyer doesn’t talk much ... indeed hardly at all, but when he does talk he reveals things which I am certain he has never revealed to anyone, even his wife, back home in Brooklyn. But Al, the Kansas farm boy, talks quite frankly about anything at all and has a collection of the finest hair-raising physiological stories ever heard. And the Sergeant tells you everything, every tremor, every nuance, every technical detail of what might be called only by the wildest stretch of romance his “love life.”

Outside our huts there is a row of Quonsets and a white beach between the coral reef and the place where coral sand turns suddenly into thick, black constantly decaying soil and the jungle rises abruptly like a wall in a tangle of wet, lush, dark green growth. It is virtually impenetrable save for a path leading to the nearest village, less than a mile away—a path which is kept open by the villagers themselves, who come to us on visits of curiosity, and by Homer, the wool-hat, who uses it in his rutting animal-like excursions.

The village is built on stilts for protection against flood and wild animals and beneath the houses there lie perpetual heaps of garbage and excrement in which a race of razorback pigs scrounge for a living. When the wind comes from the east you can smell the village and of course you can smell it whenever a villager with oiled kinky hair and greasy body comes to stare at us and make grunting noises.

It rains perpetually, at all hours of the day and night, the rain coming, it seems at times, out of nowhere. But when the sun shines, it is with a dazzling light reflected from the white coral sand so brilliantly that all of us, even Homer, the wool-hat, perpetually wear dark glasses and live in fear of losing or breaking them. Yet when you enter the jungle even for a distance of a yard or two, the brilliance vanishes and is replaced by a thick deep green gloom in which the vegetation feeds upon itself in a constant cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth. Yet with all this fantastic growth there is little to eat and what there is consists mostly of nitrogen, carbon and starch. In the midst of all this opulent growth, the natives suffer from malnutrition and are the victims of every kind of disease. Homer, the wool-hat, brought the flu with him when we arrived and passed it on to some native woman. Within ten days there were five deaths in the village.

Yet the place has a wild and extravagant beauty, especially at dawn or at sunset when the water between the outer reef and the coral beach turns crimson and gold. But the beauty is too much. It cloys in its extravagance and at times even grows terrifying. Yet I like it. Even when I sit at my typewriter naked with the sweat pouring off me in the wretched damp heat, I like it. I am relaxed. I am myself. I am free. I am, to all intents and purposes, alone, at least in spirit. No one is sharing or possessing me. I have to make few compromises. My responsibilities are simple to the point of being primitive. I even like my fellow prisoners here on this island, with the possible exception of Homer, the wool-hat, and even he does not bore me because I find him a fascinating specimen unlike anything I have ever met before in all my existence. He seems a combination of jackal, wart hog and hyena.

With the Sergeant I have the greatest bond of sympathy, perhaps because he is nearer my own age and because, happily for him, he seems to have been born without all the conventions, the false values, the hypocrisies which I have had to strip away with great effort and pain until I stand at last almost as naked and free as he is.

The other three, the Army privates who are here on this hateful but beautiful island, are a mixture. Al is a farm boy from Kansas who wants only one thing—to return to his father’s farm and marry the daughter of the next-door neighbor. Meyer is a swarthy little fellow from Brooklyn. He has a tailor shop and is married and has one child. He suffers from being away from his wife and child and even from Brooklyn which to him is paradise. The third, Homer, is a shambling, long-faced, “wool-hat” Georgian who can barely read or write. He is apparently quite happy because everything in the world astonishes him, from the size of ocean-going ships or the inside of a radio to some of the peculiar facts about sex which he never dreamed existed until he got out of his backwoods cabin into the Army.

In another world and background I should probably be bored by all of them and never get to know them at all. Here I have no choice but to know them and in doing so I have discovered that very likely no human is in essence a bore or a mediocrity. It is only that we do not have the time to explore or that we are blocked by our own limitations of interest. In this lonely jungle they make gardens in which radishes and beans grow up and mature and rot away in a few days. They fish in the muddy swollen river to bring up monstrous-looking tropical fish which they refuse to eat but give to the wild bad-smelling villagers who surround them the moment they begin operations. They listen to Tokyo Rose and sometimes, with great luck, get programs crackling with static from some distant station. They sweat, they smoke endless cigarettes. They curse a good deal and occasionally the Georgia boy goes into the bushes with one of the greasy, smelly native girls. Color does not seem to trouble this Georgian when nature presses but even the Sergeant draws the line; he says it is the smell he cannot stand and the yaws from which most of the natives suffer.

We read and read and read. I think the war must have taught many men to make a sustained effort at reading and concentration who before then had concentrated only long enough to get through a comic or the baseball score. The Sergeant likes detective stories and can read them over and over again even though he has long since learned “who dun it.” And the Kansas boy just reads over and over again a book about an American farm. It is, he says, almost as good as being back there himself.

The dark little Jewish fellow likes mystery stories too, possibly because he never read anything before he came into the Army and into a life in which the principal problem is killing time. Homer, the wool-hat, doesn’t read anything. It may be that the effort is too great for him. When he is not talking or working he just sleeps at any hour of the day or night, flat on his Army cot or, if the day is nice, leaning against a palm tree with his mouth wide open.

All of it, of course, is escape reading, and most of them regard the printed page as a kind of magic and hold in the greatest awe and veneration the writers who can put all that on paper. “Gee!” the Kansas boy will say. “I don’t know how he can do it with only words. You can smell the warm milk and the mint in the pasture.”

None of us has ever been in combat. We are what is left of a detachment sent here months ago to guard the stores kept in a row of steel Quonset huts, watching them day and night to see that the tropical rain doesn’t come through the roof and that none of the natives get in and pilfer the supplies. We are all just sitting here in time and space, lost for the moment to the rest of the world. The heat is bad and the continuous Turkish-bath rains and the insects and the monotony of the food and the company. We all get on pretty well together and until now there has never really been a serious quarrel, despite our isolation. We are all waiting, for what?

The trouble is that here we know we are waiting. There is no future. We seem to be living suspended in time and space. There is no interest or activity to distract us. There are no women but the dirty greasy-haired female savages whom no one but Homer, the wool-hat, would touch even in extremis. There is no conversation, as such. There are only the reminiscences of the men about their boyhoods or their home towns or their experiences with women which, except for the dark little Brooklynite and the Kansas farmer, seem to be pretty primitive and indiscriminate. The Brooklynite has, I gather, never known any woman but his wife in a marriage not of choice but arranged between families, and the farm boy has messed around a bit at picnics and homecomings but I doubt that he has ever had any complete experience. “Horsin’ around,” he calls it. He knows all the facts of life and he has the girl picked out, and when and if he gets back he will go through the ceremony and then the breeding operations.

I haven’t much to contribute to such conversations, not because I am wholly without experience like the Brooklyn boy, but because my own experience has been on a different level and I could not discuss it in a fashion which would interest them, even if I had any inclination to do so. Only two or three times have I had what might be called “functional” experience on the level of their rough-and-tumble affairs, and each time the experiences were unsatisfactory and even unpleasant, so that I find no pleasure in recalling them. A man doesn’t discuss his own married life, and the whole business with Mary Raeburn was no subject for discussion. I could not talk of it and in any case I doubt that, if I had, any one of them would have understood what I was talking about. The Sergeant would have observed that “She must have been a hell of a good piece” and envied me.

The jungle has a sinister extravagant beauty which, unexpectedly, is singularly monotonous. The trees, the ferns, the strange snakelike lianas and other fantastic tropical growths are all outsize and seem at times, particularly at night, to have a life and animation of their own, as if the rustlings you hear in the darkness were the sound of their growing and reaching out to overwhelm and smother and devour each other. In the daytime the birds and the butterflies, drifting through the half light which is green like deep clear sea water, seem to be flashes of light.

They are like those flashes of light which sometimes come to me here when I find my mind working, really for the first time, when I see people and things clearly—even myself—and I understand that somehow I have missed the boat all along the line and this in spite of my having had what you might call every advantage and every opportunity. These flashes of light are as painful as they are illuminating, and the odd thing is that they are followed by a spirit of the blackest depression when I find myself hoping that the war will go badly for both sides and that there will be enough destruction so that we may go back to the beginning and start to build a wholly new world. All this serves to convince me that a man like myself should never really think. He should go round and round his treadmill until at last he fades away, or live as the Sergeant does intensely and directly, rather like an animal who is comfortable and sleeps when his stomach is filled and his senses and desires put to rest.

All of this separates me in a sense from the other men on the island, none of whom have ever been corrupted by thought. We wonder, no doubt (all but Homer, the wool-hat), what goes on in each other’s mind, and even though we live so closely, so intimately in such spectacular isolation, none of us will ever really know what goes on in the inner recesses of the other’s mind. The less the mind, I suppose, the less it matters.

The terrible thing is that in our modern world there is so little place for thought or for its effects, for the mindless multiply far more rapidly than the intelligent and all the forces which surround us seek to destroy thought, to reduce everything to the level of codes and brevity, radio and movies, condensations and predigested pills of information. At home Meyer sits in his tailor’s shop, cross-legged in the old-fashioned way (that’s the way he sits on his Army cot), and he does not think, he does not consider himself, nor his surroundings, nor his faith, nor the universe. He is listening to the radio. It does not much matter what the program is. It is merely a noise that fills a void. Probably the whole of his conversation is limited to the baseball score or the latest gag by a radio comic. He has neither conversation, nor picturesqueness nor any quality whatever. He lives, breeds and dies, and that is the whole story.

It is not because Meyer is in himself a mediocrity. He has been made so by the world in which he lives. I think he talks more here on this beautiful wretched island than he talks at home and even here he talks very little, but he must think, for one cannot arrest the working of the mind save by sleep or by perpetual noise and distraction. I suspect that all of us have done some thinking we have never done before. Now and then the results of it burst out in the most unexpected way.

Al has been thinking about his farm and he says, “When I get back and can live a decent life again, I’m going to make my farm the finest in all of Kansas. I’ve been thinking about it. I know what I want to do and I’ve already got plans laid out. It’s not going to be just a good farm. It’s goin’ to be super. I’ve got to make up for all the lost time.”

Probably a lot of other boys on other beaches and islands, in other deserts, are thinking too, for the first time, because there isn’t anything else to do when the detective and mystery stories run out and can’t be read again for the fifth time. So maybe there is some good or purpose in this idiotic war.

Al has lovable qualities. He starts at you suddenly when an idea strikes him. It’s as if he experienced a kind of wonder at such an occurrence. He will scratch his head and grow intense and think on from that idea to another one. I believe he and his fellow farmers are the only ones who have mastered mechanics and machinery rather than permitting these things to master them. To Al, farm machinery is a slave, to be put to use to do things more quickly and efficiently so that he may get through his work and turn to better things. The rest of us are enslaved by radio, by automobiles and planes and telephones. We tremble and leave whatever we are doing to answer a telephone, as if we were slaves who would be punished by torture if we merely sat and permitted it to ring until it had worn itself out.

There is something supremely idiotic about our position here. I am the only one who does not wish earnestly, even passionately, to return home and get on with his life. We have been here nearly two years and may remain for God knows how long. Why are we here? To guard a depot of food and supplies which is slowly rotting away and will, when and if the war is ever finished, be dumped into the sea or burned, and all around us are these wretched natives starving in the midst of this mad unhealthy vegetation. Yet if some martinet should come on inspection to check on supplies and find that a half-dozen tins of soup were missing, the discovery could have serious consequences for me, if not for the others.

All about us among the islands are other men occupied in the same useless death watch, and here and there are a few hundred wretched Japs who have escaped and hidden away like shy animals. They will not come out of the jungle even if you leave them messages or call to them over loudspeakers to surrender. We have none here on this island and the nearest island is forty miles away, so at least we do not have the worry over being attacked and having our throats cut silently in the middle of the dark tropical night. Perhaps that might be better. It would make things a little more exciting ... at least for the other fellows.

I have the excitement of writing all of this down, this search, this exploration into what I am and how I came to be what I am. It is like exploring the jungle itself. One goes on and on, deeper and deeper as one new dim and misty vista opens up into another. I was tired when I came here but I have been in a sense reborn by what I am doing. Yet in the back of my consciousness is a perpetual fear and dread of what will happen when I come to the end of the exploration. At the moment I am living over again everything of importance that ever happened to me and it is all new and different because in a way I see it for the first time, as I could never see it when it was happening. That I suppose is what disturbed and agonized Faust himself. That is why he wanted to live it all over again, for the enjoyment and the savor which he missed the first time he passed that way. Yet there is an enjoyment merely in the whole of the exploration. I have made a new and interesting acquaintance. I have encountered someone I never knew before. It is myself.