At these times Ransom wondered whether to report him to the vagrancy authorities, frightened that after a cold weekend he might find the boy's dead body following the fish downstream. But something dissuaded him, partly his own increasing influence over the boy-he lent him paper and crayons, and helped him to read-and partly his fascination at the spectacle of this juvenile Robinson Crusoe of the waterways creating his own world out of the scraps and refuse of the twentieth century.
Fortunately, as he grew older the hazards of Philip Jordan's existence diminished, and from this starveling Crusoe scavenging for every nail and fishhook he turned into a wily young Ulysses of the waterfront. His face lengthened and narrowed, the sharp nose and arrowlike cheekbones giving him an alert, resourceful appearance. He carried out various jobs for Captain Tulloch and the yachtsmen in the basin, which made him less dependent on hunting and fish-trapping. Yet many enigmas still surrounded him. Whether these would finally be revealed with the imminent death of the river remained to be seen.
Ransom collected a bottle of turpentine and some cotton waste from a locker in the galley. Perhaps his selfishness in not reporting the youth years earlier might make Philip now pay a terrible price. Although he had managed to eke out an existence for several years, the river was no more a natural environment than a handful of pebbles and waterweed in an aquarium. Its extinction would leave Philip Jordan with a repertory of skills as useful as those of a stranded fish. To date his only enemy had been a fairly pliable nature. Man, on the other hand, had left him alone. Although Philip was not a thief-yet from where had come those mysterious "gifts"-clasp knives, a cigarette lighter, even an old goldplated watch-he had learned the arts of petty pilfering, and one day soon, if no- rain fell, he would be shot down for it like a dog.
"Come on, doctor!" Philip Jordan beckoned him through the hatchway and helped him over the rail. The swan lay inertly with wings outstretched, its plumage glistening with oil in the sunlight.
"Easy, Philip." Ransom knelt down and began to clean the swan's bill. The bird roused faintly, more in response to the manual pressure than in recovery. To Ransom it seemed nearly dead, smothered in the great weight of oil.
Impatiently, Philip Jordan shouted: "Doctor, that's no good! I'll take it down to the galley and soak off the oil." He lifted the great bird in his arms, the wings like a black drooping cross.
Ransom shook his head. "No, Philip, I'm sorry. It's too big a job."
"What?" Philip cocked an ear at him, struggling with the swan's flopping head. "What's the matter?"
"I can't spare the water. The bird's almost dead," Ransom said firmly.
"That's wrong, doctor!" Philip steadied himself in the skiff, the bird sliding in a helpless sprawl out of his black gleaming arms. "I know swans-they come back when they're nearly dead." He released the bird and let it flop between his feet. "Look, all I need is one bucket and some soap."
Involuntarily, Ransom glanced up at Catherine Austen's villa. In addition to the water tank in the roof, there was a second tank containing two hundred gallons in the pontoon of the houseboat. Some inner caution had prevented him from revealing its existence to Philip Jordan, for which he now despised himself.
"Philip, I'm sorry." He gestured at the sky. "The drought may well go on for another two or three months, perhaps forever. There's got to be an order of priorities."
"There is, doctor!" His face stiff, Philip Jordan seized his aft line and jerked it loose. "All right, I'll find some water. This river still has plenty in it."
Ransom watched him as he paddled off, his strong arms sweeping the skiff in deep surges through the water. Standing in the stern with his legs astride, his back bending, the outstretched wings of the dying bird dipping into the water from the bows, he reminded Ransom of some landlocked mariner and his stricken albatross, deserted by the sea.
Chapter 2 – The Coming of the Desert
In the sunlight the white carcasses of the fish hung from their hooks in the drying sheds, rotating slowly in the warm air. The boathouses were deserted, and the untended fishing craft were beached side by side in the shallows, their nets dragged across the dust. Below the last of the wharfs a huge quantity of smaller fish had been tipped out on to the bank, and the slope was covered with the putrefying silver bodies.
Turning his face from the stench, Ransom looked up at the quay. In the shadows at the back of the boathouse two silent faces watched him, their eyes hidden below the peaks of their caps. All the other fishermen had gone, but these two seemed content to sit there unmovingly, separated from the draining river by the dusty boat across their knees.
Ransom stepped through the fish, his feet sliding on their jellied skins. Fifty yards ahead he found an old dinghy on the bank that would save him the effort of crossing the motorbridge. Pushing off, he reached the opposite shore without needing to paddle, and then retraced his steps along the north bank toward Larchmont.
The image of the fishermen, sitting with their boat like two widows over a coffin, remained in his mind. Across the surface of the lake the pools of evaporating water stirred in the sunlight. Along its southern margins, where the open water had given way before the drought to the creeks and marshes of Philip Jordan's water-world, the channels of damper mud lay among the white beaches like gray fingers. The tall columns and gantries of an experimental distillation unit operated by the municipal authorities rose above the dunes. At intervals along the shore the dark plumes of reed fires lifted into the tinted blue sky from the deserted settlements, like the calligraphic signals of some primitive desert folk.
At the outskirts of Larchmont, Ransom climbed the bank and left the river, crossing an empty waterfront garden to the road behind. Unwashed by the rain, the streets were covered with dust and scraps of paper, the sidewalks strewn with garbage. Tarpaulins had been draped over the swimming pools, and the tattered squares lay about on the ground like ruined tents. The trim lawns shaded by. willows and plane trees, the avenues of miniature palms and rhododendrons had all vanished, leaving a clutter of ramshackle gardens. Already Larchmont was a desert town, built on an isthmus of sand between a drained lake and a forgotten river, sustained only by a few meager water holes.
Two or three months beforehand, many of the residents had built wooden towers in their gardens, some of them thirty or forty feet high, equipped with small observation platforms from which they had an uninterrupted view of the southern horizon. From this quadrant alone were any clouds expected to appear, generated from moisture evaporated off the surface of the sea. As he made his way down Columbia Drive, Ransom looked up at the towers, but none were occupied. Most of his neighbors had left to join the exodus to the coast.
Halfway down Columbia Drive a passing car swerved in front of Ransom, forcing him on to the sidewalk. It stopped twenty yards ahead. The driver opened his door and hailed him.
"Ransom, is that you? Do you want a lift?"
Ransom crossed the road, recognizing the burly, grayhaired man in a clerical collar-the Reverend Howard Johnstone, minister of the Presbyterian Church at Larchmont.
Johnstone opened the door and moved a heavy shotgun along the seat, peering at Ransom with a sharp eye.
"I nearly ran you down," Johnstone told him, beckoning him to shut the door almost before he had climbed in. "Why the devil are you wearing that beard? There's nothing to hide from here."
"Of course not, Howard," Ransom agreed. "It's purely penitential. Actually, I thought it suited me."
"It doesn't. Let me assure you of that."
A man of vigorous and uncertain temper, the Reverend Johnstone was one of those muscular clerics who intimidate their congregations not so much by the prospect of divine justice at some future date as by the threat of immediate physical retribution in the here and now. Well over six feet tall, his strong head topped by a fierce crown of gray hair, he towered over his parishioners from his pulpit, eying each of them in their pews like a bad-tempered headmaster obliged to take a junior form for one day and determined to inflict the maximum of benefit upon them. His long, slightly twisted Jaw gave all his actions an air of unpredictability, but during the previous months he had become almost the last surviving pillar of the lakeside community. Ransom found his befficose manner hard to take-something about the sharp eyes and lack of charity made him suspicious of the minister's motives-but nonetheless he was glad to see him. At Johnstone's initiative a number of artesian wells had been drilled and a local militia recruited, ostensibly to guard the church and property of his parishioners, but in fact to keep out the transients moving along the highway to the south. Recently a curious streak had emerged in Johnstone's character. He had developed a fierce moral contempt for those who had given up the fight against the drought and retreated to the coast. In a series of fighting sermons preached during the last three or four Sundays he had warned his listeners of the offense they would be committing by opting out of the struggle against the elements. By some strange logic he seemed to believe that the battle against the drought, like that against evil itself, was the local responsibility of every community and private individual throughout the land, and that a strong element of rivalry was to be encouraged between the contestants, brother set against brother, in order to keep the battle joined.