Free Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry Page B

war, a coveted medal. Nor with all his faults was he at bottom a vicious man. Without knowing quite why M. Laruelle felt he might have actually proved a great force for good. But Sr Bustamente had never said he was a coward. Almost reverently Sr Bustamente pointed out that being a coward and afraid for one’s life were two different things in Mexico. And certainly the Consul was not vicious but an
hombre noble
. Yet might not just such a character and distinguished record as M. Laruelle claimed was his have precisely qualified him for the excessively dangerous activities of a spider? It seemed useless to try and explain to Sr Bustamente that the poor Consul’s job was merely a retreat, that while he had intended originally to enter the Indian Civil Service, he had in fact entered the Diplomatic Service only for one reason and another to be kicked downstairs into ever remoter consulships, and finally into the sinecure in Quauhnahuac as a position where he was least likely to prove a nuisance to the Empire, in which, with one part of his mind at least, M. Laruelle suspected he so passionately believed.
    But why had all this happened? he asked himself now.
¿Quién sabe
? He risked another
anís
, and at the first sip a scene, probably rather inaccurate (M. Laruelle had been in the artillery during the last war, survived by him in spite of Guillaume Apollinaire’s being for a time his commanding officer), was conjured to his mind. A dead calm on the line, but the
s. s. Samaritan
, if she should have been on the line, was actually far north of it. Indeed for a steamer bound from Shanghai to Newcastle, New South Wales, with a cargo of antimony and quicksilver and wolfram she had for some time been steering a rather odd course. Why, for instance, had she emerged into the Pacific Ocean out of the Bungo Strait in Japan south of Shikoku and not far from the East China Sea? For days now, not unlike a stray sheep on the immeasurable green meadows of waters, she had been keeping an offing from various interesting islands far out of her path. Lot’s Wife and Arzobispo. Rosario and Sulphur Island. Volcano Island and St Augustine. It was somewhere between Guy Rock and the Euphrosyne Reef that she first sighted the periscope and sent her engines full speed astern. But when the submarine surfaced she hove to. An unarmed merchantman, the
Samaritan
put up no fight. Before the boarding party from the submarine reached her, however, she suddenly changed her temper. As if by magic the sheep turned to a dragon belching fire. The U-boat did not even have time to dive. Her entire crew was captured. The
Samaritan
, who had lost her captain in the engagement, sailed on, leaving the submarine burning helplessly, a smoking cigar a-glow on the vast surface of the Pacific.
    And in some capacity obscure to M. Laruelle — for Geoffrey had not been in the merchant service but, arrived via the yacht club and something in salvage, a naval lieutenant, or God knows perhaps by that time a lieutenant-commander — the Consul had been largely responsible for this escapade. And for it, or gallantry connected with it, he had received the British Distinguished Service Order or Cross.
    But there was a slight hitch apparently. For whereas the submarine’s crew became prisoners of war when the
Samaritan
(which was only one of the ship’s names, albeit that the Consul liked best) reached port, mysteriously none of her officers was among them. Something had happened to those German officers, and what had happened was not pretty. They had, it was said, been kidnapped by the
Samaritan’s
stokers and burned alive in the furnaces.
    M. Laruelle thought of this. The Consul loved England andas a young man may have subscribed — though it was doubtful, this being rather more in those days the prerogative of non-combatants — to the popular hatred of the enemy. But he was a man of honour and probably no one supposed for a moment he had