“Even the sloth, which generally knows no fear, was afraid. It tried to run away, hooked itself on to a thinner part of the branch, which broke. It fell, and at once was covered with a shuddering mass of jelly. Those boneless men do not bite: they suck. And, as they suck, their color changes from gray to pink and then to brown.
“But they are afraid of us. There is race-memory involved here. We repel them, and they repel us. When they became aware of my presence, they—I was going to say, ran away—they slid away, dissolved into the shadows that kept dancing and dancing and dancing under the trees. And the horror came upon me, so that I ran away, and arrived back at our camp, bloody about the face with thorns, and utterly exhausted.
“Yeoward was lancing a place in his ankle. A tourniquet was tied under his knee. Nearby lay a dead snake. He had broken its back with that same metal plate, but it had bitten him first. He said: ‘What kind of a snake do you call this? I’m afraid it is venomous. I feel a numbness in my cheeks and around my heart, and I cannot feel my hands.’
“I said: ‘Oh, my God! You’ve been bitten by a jararaca!’
“‘And we have lost our medical supplies,’ he said, with regret. ‘And there is so much work left to do. Oh, dear me, dear me! . . . Whatever happens, my dear fellow, take this and get back.’
“And he gave me that semicircle of unknown metal as a sacred trust. Two hours later, he died. That night the circle of glowing eyes grew narrower. I emptied my rifle at it, time and again. At dawn, the boneless men disappeared.
“I heaped rocks on the body of Yeoward. I made a pylon, so that the men without bones could not get at him. Then—oh, so dreadfully lonely and afraid!—I shouldered my pack, and took my rifle and my machete, and ran away, down the trail we had covered. But I lost my way.
“Can by can of food, I shed weight. Then my rifle went, and my ammunition. After that, I threw away even my machete. A long time later, that semicircular plate became too heavy for me, so I tied it to a tree with liana vine, and went on.
“So I reached the Ahu territory, where the tattooed men nursed me and were kind to me. The women chewed my food for me, before they fed me, until I was strong again. Of the stores we have left there, I took only as much as I might need, leaving the rest as payment for guides and men to man the canoe down the river. And so I got back out of the jungle. . . .
“Please give me a little more rum.” His hand was steady, now, as he drank, and his eyes were clear.
I said to him: “Assuming that what you say is true: these ‘boneless men’—they were, I presume, the Martians? Yet it sounds unlikely, surely? Do invertebrates smelt hard metals and——”
“Who said anything about Martians?” cried Doctor Goodbody. “No, no, no! The Martians came here, adapted themselves to new conditions of life. Poor fellows, they changed, sank low; went through a whole new process—a painful process of evolution. What I’m trying to tell you, you fool, is that Yeoward and I did not discover Martians. Idiot, don’t you see? Those boneless things are men.We are Martians!”
“BUSTO IS A GHOST, TOO MEAN TO GIVE US A FRIGHT!”
There was no such man as Shakmatko, but there really was Busto’s lodging-house. It was just as I described it: a rickety, rotting, melancholy old house not far from New Oxford Street. The day came when Busto was kicked out: his lease had expired five years before, anyway. He fought like a trapped lynx to retain possession of the place, but the borough surveyor and the sanitary inspector had it in iron pincers. It was condemned and executed, torn to pieces, taken away in carts. And a good riddance, I say! Yet in retrospect one half regrets such demolitions. “Where is the house in which I lived?” one asks; and, walking past, looks up at the housebreakers, and sighs . . . “Ahhhhh. . . .”
Pah!
Time is more than a healer. It is a painter and decorator; a gilder and a glorifier. It converts the gritty particles of half-forgotten miseries into what sentimental old gentlemen call pearls of memory. Memory! Memory; fooey on memory! What a smooth liar it is, this memory! I have heard a shrapnel-tattered veteran recalling, with something suspiciously like sentimental regret, the mud of Passchendaele. I could feel twinges of pleasurable emotion about Busto’s, if I let myself go. Yet I endured several miseries there. The place was chock-full of my pet aversions. Bedbugs, of which I have always had a nameless horror, came out at night and walked over me. For some reason unknown to science they never bit me. But other insects did. I used to lie in bed, too hungry and tired to sleep, and look out of the window over the black roofs, and listen to the faint, sad noises of the sleeping house; and marvel at the fearsome strength of vermin. Sandow, Hackenschmidt, gorillas, whales; they are nothing. For truly awful physical force watch insects. Compare the heart-bursting sprints of Olympic runners with the effortless speed of the spider; the bloody and ferocious gluttony of the wolf with that of the louse; the leap of the panther with the jump of the flea!
Busto’s ghoulish presence filled the house. One worried about the rent. Sometimes I wrote verse at night, in true poetic style, by the light of a halfpenny candle—oh, most execrable verse, full of inspissated, treacly, heavy blue-black gloom. . . .
—that kind of thing. What green caves? I forget. I think they were to be found in a “sea to sink in.” What sea? Sink what? I don’t remember. I also wrote a novel called The Blonde and Oscar. It was so sordid that it made publishers’ readers scratch themselves. Compared with it, L’Assommoir was like something by Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Jude the Obscure a kind of Winnie the Pooh. Prostitutes? Millions of ’em. Degenerates? On every page. I left no stone unthrown; explored every drainpipe; took three deep breaths, attached a stone to my feet, exhaled, and sank to the bottom of the cesspit with a hideous gurgle. I tell you, publishers dropped it with muffled cries, and afterwards scrubbed their hands, like men who reach for pebbles on a beach and accidentally pick up something disgusting.
I was always having fights with other lodgers. My nerves were on edge. I was, in any case, a bit of an idiot, foolish with an uninspired foolishness—hell is full of such. I was unbelievably bumptious, arrogant, loudmouthed, moody, quarrelsome, bull-headed, touchy, gloomy, and proud in a silly kind of way. At the prospect of a roughhouse I boiled over with murderous joy. Only one man on earth inspired me with fear, and that was Busto.
Pio Busto used to cross himself before a lithograph of the Mona Lisa. He thought it represented the Virgin Mary. But in any case it was generally believed that Busto had no soul to save.
How small, how bent, and how virulent was Pio Busto, with his bulldog jaws, and his spine curved like a horseshoe! How diabolical were the little eyes, hard and black as basalt, that squinted out of his pale, crunched-up face! Ragged, dirty, and lopsided, he had the appearance of a handful of spoiled human material, crumpled and thrown aside, accidentally dropped out of the cosmic dustbin. It was said of him: “Busto is not human. Busto is not alive. Busto is a ghost, too mean to give us a fright.”