A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
GUATEMALA was the first country (Russia was the second) where I saw infantry marching and making no noise at all with their feet. In Russia this was because they were marching on fresh snow, in Guatemala it was because they had bare feet (but that was a long time ago). I remember sitting in an observation car of the Ferrocarriles Internacionales de Guatemala, which links Puerto Barrios with the capital, 6,000 feet above sea-level, and reading a Tauchnitz edition of an early Maugham novel. In a foreword Mr. Maugham referred to some trouble which had arisen by reason of his having inadvertently given the name of a living person to an unsympathetic character in his last book; he always, he explained, tried to reduce as far as possible the risk of this happening by selecting the names of his characters from the Deaths column in The Times. But he hadn't done this in the case of the man I was going to stay with, and whom Mr. Maugham had met some years before. Though he is dead now, Dr. Macphail lives on, under his own name, as the shrewd, tolerant, understanding Scots doctor in Rain: I throw in the fact that his sister had been a drawing mistress at my private school not so much to strengthen the reader's grasp of Central American realities as to remind him what a small (but con- fusing) place the world is.
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