Under the Volcano Read Online Free PDF Page A

duffer like Jacques. Jacques and the Old Bean had often decided
that the Hell Bunker would be a nice place to take a girl, though wherever you
took one, it was understood nothing very serious happened. There was, in
general, about the whole business of   "picking up" an air of innocence. After a while the Old Bean,
who was a virgin to put it mildly, and Jacques, who pretended he was not, fell
into the habit of picking up girls on the promenade, walking to the golf
course, separating there, and meeting later. There were, oddly, fairly regular
hours at the Taskersons'. M. Laruelle didn't know to this day why there was no
understanding about the Hell Bunker. He had certainly no intention of playing
Peeping Tom on Geoffrey. He had happened with his girl, who bored him, to be
crossing the eighth fairway towards Leasowe Drive when both were startled by
voices coming from the bunker. Then the moonlight disclosed the bizarre scene
from which neither he nor the girl could turn their eyes. Laruelle would have
hurried away but neither of them--neither quite aware of the sensible impact of
what was occurring in the Hell Bunker--could control their laughter. Curiously,
M. Laruelle had never remembered what anyone said, only the expression on
Geoffrey's face in the moonlight and the awkward grotesque way the girl had
scrambled to her feet, then, that both Geoffrey and he behaved with remarkable
aplomb. They all went to a tavern with some queer name, as "The Case is
Altered." It was patently the first time the Consul had ever been into a
bar on his own initiative; he ordered Johnny Walkers all round loudly, but the
waiter, encountering the proprietor, refused to serve them and they were turned
out as minors. Alas, their friendship did not for some reason survive these two
sad, though doubtless providential, little frustrations. M. Laruelle's father
had meantime dropped the idea of sending him to school in England. The holiday
fizzled out in desolation and equinoctial gales. It had been a melancholy
dreary parting at Liverpool and a dreary melancholy journey down to Dover and
back home, lonesome as an onion peddler, on the sea-swept channel boat to Calais.
    M. Laruelle straightened, instantly
becoming aware of activity, to step just in time from the path of a horseman
who had reined up sideways across the bridge. Darkness had fallen like the
House of Usher. The horse stood blinking in the leaping headlights of a car, a
rare phenomenon so far down the Calle Nicaragua, that was approaching from the
town, rolling like a ship on the dreadful road. The rider of the horse was so
drunk he was sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, a feat in itself
considering their size, and barely managing to hold on by the reins, though not
once did he grasp the pommel to steady himself. The horse reared wildly,
rebellious--half fearful, half contemptuous, perhaps, of its rider--then it
catapulted in the direction of the car: the man, who seemed to be falling
straight backwards at first, miraculously saved himself only to slip to one
side like a trick rider, regained the saddle, slid, slipped, fell
backwards--just saving himself each time, but always with the reins, never with
the pommel, holding them in one hand now, the stirrups still unrecovered as he
furiously beat the horse's flanks with the machete he had withdrawn from a long
curved scabbard. Meantime the headlights had picked out a family straggling
down the hill, a man and a woman in mourning, and two neatly dressed children,
whom the woman drew in to the side of the road as the horseman fled on, while
the man stood back against the ditch. The car halted, dimming its lights for
the rider, then came towards M. Laruelle and crossed the bridge behind him. It
was a powerful silent car, of American build, sinking deeply on its springs,
its engine scarcely audible, and the sound of the horse's hooves rang out
plainly, receding now, slanting up the ill-lit Calle Nicaragua, past the
Consul's