The Survivor Read Free

actually depressing Seagram’s shoulders in his apparently bilious urgency, and signalling with his eyes for the man who had thought Leeming had died or something to pull his chair in close to the board and make a passageway.
    â€œâ€¦ that since Valerie Kable is such a lovely lady and since his possession is our loss …,” the sergeant-at-arms was braying.
    Ramsey considered calling to him in mid-flight something such as, “Don’t fool yourself, Davy Crockett. She’d take on anyone but the barber’s cat. And ask Brother Eric if he isn’t a queer?”
    Behind him murmurs of awakening concern developed, so he took the stairs quickly. At the street door he failed by a fraction to have the courage of his anger, to turn into the saloon bar and later be found, quietly drinking there, by Kable and President Lance and the mace-rattling Texan who would no doubt try to fine him for sickening at dinner. He regretted that he was still too aware of his mission in the town to deliberately construct that insult, to make it clear that he favoured the drifting population of the bar against the communion of elders upstairs. Grudgingly, he turned into the street.
    It was a night of dry warmth in Pinalba, whose town-lights scarcely restrained the sharp stars. All sounds were distanced, as he wanted them to be after the rowdy brotherhood upstairs. There was a lonely argument, high, forlorn voices, progressing in the doorway of the coloured peoples’ pub. The very way it came to the ear told you that you were in a flat town and a town that was at the hour of plate-scraping and tea-leaves.
    Not his town. He fled it as far as the river, and was listening to a small weir functioning somewhere in the dark when Kable found him.
    â€œIs there anything I can do, Alec?” Kable asked like someone lodging a complaint.
    â€œThey don’t give a damn.…” But he knew he was making himself even more absurd by saying it. In fact, shrouded in the long dying fronds of a willow that infringed the foot-bridge, Alec heard but did not see Kable despairing of him in the dark.
    â€œYou make it sound as if he did it all for Pinalba Rotary and they—swine that they are—don’t appreciate it.”
    â€œDon’t you worry. I know he didn’t necessarily do it for anybody. But what he went through is its own monument.”
    â€œ They don’t deny that. Besides, it’s such an old, old monument.”
    â€œIt doesn’t deserve to round off an evening of Pete Someone making up to Clive Spurling’s wife in the Pinalba Mall. It doesn’t deserve to land in a ditch with Russ Healey.”
    â€œIt could do a lot worse.”
    But he didn’t listen to Kable; rather to water edging over the soft lip of the weir, renewing him. Not a basic renewal, of course, but an excellent ad hoc one.
    Softly he quoted the president, mocking the man across the man’s town. “An expedition to.… Where was the expedition to exactly, Alec?”
    Kable, baffled but never berserk, gave three or four comforting pats to the bridge handrail. “My God, you know that fellow spent three years under the Japanese? He worked on the Burma railway. You had to see one friend die, Alec, and admittedly that friend was a man among men and it seems to have had an … irradicable effect on you. But that fellow watched dozens of friends die. The difference seems to me to be that he wouldn’t … he wouldn’t throw a tantrum if you didn’t know the geographical details of what he went through.”
    Alec was not angry. He had taken a seat on the parapet and could read the fluorescent river-marker below. Three feet one inch, it said; and for the men still convened at the hotel thousands of dollars were involved in that river level, so low with the summer still to come. But they had the grace, the humility, to be gay after their fashion.
    Alec said, “Perhaps he should throw a