Dialogue: Second thoughts aren't much help

In a poem called Snake, D.H. Lawrence tells how he went to a water trough to drink in the heat of the day and found a snake there before him.

The snake was venomous and Lawrence had to wait in line.

I have always liked the poem, partly for the description of the slack-bellied snake and the precise way it sips at the water-trough, but more for the way the poem ends.

Last night it was raining. I was driving up the motorway towards the Lyttelton tunnel, having spent the evening playing pool in a garage and sipping at good beer, drinking it slowly like whisky, making the bottle last, because I would be driving home.

My companions were a taxi-driver who played flamboyantly and a slack-bellied internet entrepreneur who was surprisingly diffident and warm of heart and who owned the pool table and the garage.

I played lucky pool, beat them both several times and then we sat on plastic chairs to smoke and talk about God and literacy and race. It was a fine evening.

Beside the motorway a youth was hitching. He should not have been. The car ahead of me slowed. When the youth ran towards it the car drove away, the kids in the back seat leaning out of the window in the rain to laugh at the hitchhiker. He raised fingers to them.

Because I did not learn to drive a car until I was 28, and because I travelled many thousands of miles by thumb, I always pick up hitchhikers unless their appearance scares me. I stopped.

The youth was drenched and when he climbed into the front seat I could smell the beer on him. I asked him where he was going. Akaroa, I thought he said.

I was going only as far as Lyttelton. Akaroa was an hour of hilly backroads beyond. In such weather and at such a time of night the youth stood little chance of getting a lift.

I told him so. He did not reply. I looked across and his eyes were closed.

I nudged him awake and said it all again.

"I've got all night," he said. "It's taken all day to get out of Hamilton."

"Hamilton?"

"Got to get to Tokoroa. I live in Tokoroa," he said, as if explaining to someone stupid. His eyes started to close again.

I was unsure what to do.

"You know you're in Christchurch, don't you?"

"Yeah," he said, but he didn't.

I kept him talking through the tunnel. I did not want him falling asleep in the car. I felt discomfited, not by his peaceable drunkenness but by his unreason.

I also knew that I should give him a bed for the night, breakfast in the bright morning and then send him on his way. But I didn't want to. I didn't want the inconvenience.

He said he was a student. Exams were in a fortnight. I asked him if he was running away from something but the question got no answer. I repeated that I was going only as far as Lyttelton where I lived. He said that was fine but I don't believe he heard me. My words were noise.

We came out of the tunnel and turned a corner and I stopped the car. He was fast asleep again. I nudged him and he asked me if we were in Tokoroa. I told him we were in Lyttelton and this was as far as I could take him. He fumbled a bit for the door catch and then got out and walked down the street.

This side of the hills it was not raining but below the streetlights the wind of midnight billowed his shirt of red check. I watched him down the road. For a drunk he walked remarkably straight.

I drove home, greeted the dogs, checked for telephone messages and found I had none, then put my jacket back on, got back into the car and drove round Lyttelton to look for the youth and offer him a bed for the night.

The bars had almost all closed. I couldn't find him. I wondered what he would be doing, whether he was curled in a garage or had found a lift further into confusion. I knew I had failed him. My selfishness had failed him and I felt guilt.

This morning the guilt is only a niggle. By tomorrow it will have gone.

At the end of the poem Lawrence threw a log at the snake. Its tail writhed and it was gone and Lawrence was left with regret. He knew he had let himself down, had betrayed some sense of fitness, rightness.

"And I have something to expiate," wrote Lawrence, "a pettiness."