He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room

He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said: "José." He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite, three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. "José," somebody squeaked again, "José." He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee: his little pink eyes showed no anger—he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged and baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the license they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise: "José, José. Come to bed, José." Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.
Chapter 3
CAPTAIN FELLOWS sang loudly to himself, while the little motor chugged in the bows of the canoe. His big sunburned face was like the map of a mountain region—patches of varying brown with two small lakes that were his eyes. He composed his songs as he went, and his voice was quite tuneless. "Going home, going home, the food will be good for m-e-e. I don't like the food in the bloody citee." He turned out of the main stream into a tributary: a few alligators lay on the sandy margin. "I don't like your snouts, O trouts. I don't like your snouts, O trouts." He was a happy man.
The banana plantations came down on either bank: his voice boomed under the hard sun: that and the churr of the motor were the only sounds anywhere—he was completely alone. He was borne up on a big tide of boyish joy—doing a mans job, the heart of the wild: he felt no responsibility for anyone. In only one other country had he felt more happy, and that was in war-time France, in the ravaged landscape of trenches. The tributary corkscrewed farther into the marshy overgrown state, and a buzzard lay spread out in the sky. Captain Fellows opened a tin box and ate a sandwich—food never tasted so good as out of doors. A monkey made a sudden chatter at him as he went by, and Captain Fellows felt happily at one with nature—a wide shallow kinship with all the world moved with the bloodstream through the veins: he was at home anywhere. The artful little devil, he thought, the artful little devil. He began to sing again—somebody else's words a little jumbled in his friendly unretentive memory. "Give to me the life I love, bread I dip in the river, under the wide and starry sky, the hunter's home from the sea." The plantations petered out, and far behind the mountains came into view, heavy black lines drawn low-down across the sky. A few bungalows rose out of the mud. He was home. A very slight cloud marred his happiness.
He thought: After all, a man likes to be welcomed.
He walked up to his bungalow: it was distinguished from [27] the others which lay along the bank by a tiled roof, a flagpost without a flag, a plate on the door with the title, "Central American Banana Company." Two hammocks were strung up on the veranda, but there was nobody about. Captain Fellows knew where to find his wife—it was not she he had expected. He burst boisterously through a door and shouted: 'Daddy's home." A scared thin face peeked at him through a mosquito net; his boots ground peace into the floor; Mrs. Fellows flinched away into the white muslin tent. He said: "Pleased to see me, Trix?" and she drew rapidly on her face the outline of her frightened welcome. It was like a trick you do with a blackboard. Draw a dog in one line without lifting the chalk—and the answer, of course, is a sausage.