Dark Entries (13 page)

He could see now that the dust was thinning all the time; no doubt settling on the floor and hard, resisting furniture. The fire was glowing ever more strongly; and to Pendlebury it seemed in the end that all the specks of dust had formed themselves into the likeness of living, writhing Byzantine columns, which spiralled their barley-sugar whorls through the very texture of the air. The whorls were rapidly losing density, however, and the rosy air clearing. As the last specks danced and died Pendlebury realised that the waiting room was full of people.

There were six people on the side bench which started near his head; and he believed as many on the corresponding bench at the opposite side of the room. He could not count the number on the other bench, because several more people obscured the view by sitting on the table. Pendlebury could see further shadowy figures on the bench which stood against his own wall the other side of the fireplace. The people were of both sexes and all ages, and garbed in
the greatest imaginable variety. They were talking softly but seriously to one another. Those nearest the fire sometimes stretched a casual hand toward the flames, as people seated near to a fire usually do. Indeed, except perhaps for the costume of some of them (one woman wore a splendid evening dress), there was but one thing unusual about these people . . . Pendlebury could not precisely name it. They looked gentle
and charming and in every way sympathetic, those who looked rich and those who looked poor. But Pendlebury felt that there was about them some single uncommon thing which, if he could find it
,
would unite and clarify their various distinctions. Whatever this thing was Pendlebury was certain that it was shared by him with the people in the waiting room, and with few others. He then reflected that naturally he was dreaming.

To realise that one is dreaming is customarily disagreeable, so that one strains to awake. But than this dream Pendlebury wanted nothing better. The unexepected semi-tranquillity he had before at times felt in the comfortless waiting room was now made round and complete. He lay back with a sigh to watch and listen.

On the side bench next to him, with her shoulder by his head, was a pretty girl wearing a black shawl. Pendlebury knew that she was pretty although much of her face was turned away from him as she gazed at the young man seated beside her, whose hand she held. He too had looks in his own way, Pendlebury thought. About both the clothes and the general aspect of the pair was something which recalled a nineteenth-century picture by an Academician. None the less it was instantly apparent that each lived only for the other. Their love was like a magnifying glass between them.

On the near corner of the bench at the other side of the fire sat an imposing old man. He had a bushel of silky white hair, a fine brow, a commanding nose, and the mien of a philosopher king. He sat in silence, but from time to time smiled slightly upon his own thoughts. He too seemed dressed in a past fashion.

Those seated upon the table were unmistakably of today. Though mostly young, they appeared to be old friends, habituated to trusting one another with the truth. They were at the centre of the party, and their animation was greatest. It was to them that Pendlebury most wanted to speak. The longing to communicate with these quiet, happy people soon reached a passionate intensity which Pendlebury had never before known in
a dream, but only, very occasionally, upon awaking from one. But now, though warm and physically
relaxed, almost indeed disembodied, Pendlebury was unable to move; and the people in the waiting room seemed unaware of his presence. He felt desperately shut out from a party he was compelled to attend.

Slowly but unmistakably the tension of community and sodality waxed among them, as if a loose mesh of threads weaving about between the different individuals was being drawn tighter and closer, further isolating them from the rest of the world, and from Pendlebury: the party was advancing into a communal phantasmagoria, as parties should, but in Pendlebury’s experience seldom did; an ombre chinoise of affectionate ease and intensified inner life. Pendlebury so plainly belonged with them. His flooding sensation of identity with them was the most authentic and the most momentous he had ever known. But he was wholly cut off from them; there was, he felt, a bridge which they had crossed and he had not. And they were the select best of the world, from different periods and classes and ages and tempers; the nicest people he had ever known – were it only that he could know them.

And now the handsome woman in evening dress (Edwardian evening dress, Pendlebury thought, décolleté but polypetalous) was singing, and the rest were hushed to listen. She was singing a drawing-room ballad, of home and love and paradise; elsewhere doubtless absurd, but here sweet and moving, made so in part by her steady mezzo-soprano voice and soft intimate pitch. Pendlebury could see only her pale face and bosom in the firelight, the shadow of her dark hair massed tight on the head above her brow, the glinting and gleaming of the spirit caught within the large jewel at her throat, the upward angle of her chin; but more and more as she sang it was as if a broad knife turned round and round in his heart, scooping it away. And all the time he knew that he had seen her before; and knew also that in dreams there is little hope of capturing such mighty lost memories.

He knew that soon there would be nothing left, and that it was necessary to treasure the moments which remained. The dream was racing away from him like a head of water when the sluice is drawn. He wanted to speak to the people in the
waiting room, even inarticulately to cry out to them for rescue; and could feel that the power, hitherto cut off, would soon be once more upon him. But all the time the rocks and debris of common life were ranging themselves before him as the ebbing dream uncovered them more and more. When he could speak, he knew that there was no one to speak to.

In the doorway of the waiting room stood a man with a lantern.

‘All right, sir?’

The courtesy suggested that it was not the porter of the previous night.

Pendlebury nodded. Then he turned his face to the wall, out of the lantern’s chilly beam.

‘All right, sir?’ said the man again. He seemed to be sincerely concerned.

Pendlebury, alive again, began to pick his way from lump to lump across the dry but muddy watercourse.

‘Thank you. I’m all right.’

He still felt disembodied with stiffness and numbness and cold.

‘You know you shouted at me? More like a scream, it was. Not a nice thing to hear in the early morning.’ The man was quite friendly.

‘I’m sorry. What’s the time?’

‘Just turned the quarter. There’s no need to be sorry. So long as you’re all right.’

‘I’m frozen. That’s all.’

‘I’ve got a cup of tea brewed for you in the office. I found the other’s porter’s note when I opened up this morning. He didn’t ought to have put you in here.’

Pendlebury had forced both his feet to the floor, and was feebly brushing down his coat with his congealed hands.

‘There was no choice. I missed my station
.
I understand there’s nowhere else to go.’

‘He didn’t ought to have put you in here, sir,’ repeated the porter.

‘You mean the regulations? He warned me about them.’

The porter looked at Pendlebury’s dishevelled mass on the hard, dark bench.

‘I’ll go and pour out that tea.’ When he had gone, Pendlebury perceived through the door the first frail foreshadowing of the slow northern dawn.

Soon he was able to follow the porter to the little office. Already the stove was roaring.

‘That’s better, sir,’ said the porter, as Pendlebury sipped the immensely strong liquor.

Pendlebury had begun to shiver, but he turned his head towards the porter and tried to smile.

‘Reckon anything’s better than a night in Casterton station waiting room for the matter of that,’ said the porter. He was leaning against the high desk, with his arms folded and his feet set well apart before the fire. He was a middle-aged man, with grey eyes and the look of one who carried responsibilities.

‘I expect I’ll survive.’

‘I expect you will, sir. But there’s some who didn’t.’

Pendlebury lowered his cup to the saucer. He felt that his hand was shaking too much for dignity. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How was that?’

‘More tea, sir?’

‘I’ve half a cup to go yet.’

The porter was regarding him gravely. ‘You didn’t know that Casterton station’s built on the site of the old gaol?’

Pendlebury tried to shake his head.

‘The waiting room’s on top of the burial ground.’

‘The burial ground?’

‘That’s right, sir. One of the people there is Lily Torelli, the Beautiful Nightingale. Reckon they hadn’t much heart in those times, sir. Not when it came to the point.’

Pendlebury said nothing for a long minute. Far away he could hear a train. Then he asked: ‘Did the other porter know this?’

‘He did, sir. Didn’t you notice?’

‘Notice what?’

The porter said nothing, but simply imitated the other porter’s painful and uncontrollable twitch.

Pendlebury stared. Terror was waxing with the cold sun.

‘The other porter used to be a bit too partial to the bottle. One night he spent the night in that waiting room himself.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’ Suddenly Pendlebury turned from the porter’s grey eyes.

‘You might want to mention it. If you decide to see a doctor about the trouble yourself.’ The porter’s voice was full of solicitude but less full of hope. ‘Nerves, they say it is. Just nerves.’

As the boat cast off from the landing stage and began to rise and fall in the yellow waters of the Mersey, Carfax recalled
The Last of England
.

The wide, swift river and the tall buildings on both banks, the Liver Building, the Cunard offices, and the huge constructions, mysterious in purpose, which sprang up like indestructible molehills when the Mersey Tunnel forced its way from shore to shore, provided a scale, lacking in an open seascape, by which to set off the smallness of the vessel. Before him the urgent, dangerous-looking stream could be seen suddenly to end and be replaced by the empty ocean: a question mark in the mind. New Brighton Tower, much larger, apparently, then any southern equivalent, stood at the end of the river like the upright of a gateway the other side of which was concealed from Carfax by the superstructure of the boat. In that building, he seemed to remember, Granville Bantock had contended with popular audiences and the dead weight of past misery which drips like Mersey rain upon the mind of all artists. Carfax was not the man to live on the beach like Whitman (the very weather of Liverpool discouraged such a thought), or even like Gauguin (the manner of whose death could please no one) on a warm island, but he suspected that his own not unsuccessful career in the Foreign Office had already so sobered and discoloured his imagination that his music and painting, products now of
‘spare time’ only, would be unlikely to catch that great joy of emancipation which alone, he asserted, made life and art worthy of attention. Carfax always saw all good in terms of ‘emancipation’: all beauty, all duty. Others had seen the vision, but the slave selves of their past had intervened, making the gorgeous tawdry, the building in strange materials as rapidly failing in beauty, use, and esteem as the human body itself.

‘The very dampness of the air does, however, on occasion lend a wonderful depth of colour to the landscape,’ Carfax had read in his guide book. The glass through which he glimpsed life as he sailed that morning imparted this rainbow-watery transient clarity of colour, while compressing and encircling with a boundless edge of uncertainty. Hence
The Last of England
: minor masterpiece, he felt, not so much of doomed adventure and hope to be blighted, as of escape unsanguine but compelled.

Through that unexpected consortium of rain, fog, and wind which is the characteristic climate of Merseyside, Carfax watched the fifteen-foot liver birds on top of the great building recede into the driving cloud which is their element. Mythical, yet, in the case of at least one specimen, to be seen stuffed in a Liverpool public building, these creatures ride the seldom-abating storm like human hopes. He remembered that fifteen years ago he had hastened third-class to Liverpool in
pursuit of a beautiful vaudeville actress then appearing in that city at the Shakespeare. Passion, he seemed to recall, was then something unable to be left with his cheap synthetic suitcase in the station cloak-room. The boat was beginning to roll to an extent which many of his neighbours seemed to think disagreeable; and Carfax wondered whether unhappiness or nausea tended the faster to produce the other.

By the time they were nearing the Bar Light, terminus of the long double series of buoys which leads vessels from Liverpool towards the fathomless submarine canyon lying concealed north and south down the middle of the Irish Sea, Carfax had discovered the bow of the boat to be
uninhabitably gale-swept and also lacking in seats; astern he found the best place which offered, and, sinking into his overcoat, watched the crew as the lightship was passed heave overboard the ‘fish’ on the end of a line which, turning in the water, records on a dial the distance travelled. It was cold and damp, but not intolerable, or, at least, not physically so. Carfax wondered what a real storm was like: being swept overboard by a wave, seeing a whole life as a vision to be clutched lest worse befall, watching wet clothes being dried before an almost soaked out fire; or the boredom of life in
an open boat with strangers, ships’ biscuit accompanying horrible corned beef as a diet, the lack of interest among friends who would have to hear the story for unavoidable social and practical reasons.

As England receded, however, into a memory of ill-painted buildings and a line of unhappy faces taken off their guard on the underground railways, Carfax to his surprise began to notice signs suggesting that his fellow voyagers considered the weather to be improving. A speck of glowing ash blew on his face from a newly lighted cigarette; deck chairs began to be dragged clatteringly over his feet from the heap; from across the boat a hot smell reached him of fish and chips and greasy
Liverpool
Echo
;
a portable wireless began to thrum and pound, its operator varying popular tunes of the type Carfax himself had composed for small sums of money in earlier days, with violent unaimed thrusts into ‘the ether’, explorations generally ending in an echo of lowest-common-denominator fundamentalism.

‘She has no idea how plain she is and of course you can’t tell her,’ observed a conspicuously unattractive woman of about forty-five to a replica of herself.

‘Communism gives the workers something to work
for
,’ vehemently asserted a man in
a raincoat. His wispy, colourless hair appeared on his prematurely obtruding scalp-line like the last vegetation in the dust bowl.

‘So I said I’d give
it to her if she promised to have it dyed green,’ remarked a round matron to her bored and miserable-looking husband.

‘If you’ll bring in the orders, I’ll look after production. You can leave that to me. I know how to handle the ruddy Government.’

‘In the end I had to drag the clothes off her, and she tried to turn quite nasty.’ The speaker looked away from the other man, and laughed gloatingly before resuming his former confidential mutter.

‘There’s no hope for the world but a big revival of
real
Christianity,’ said the serious-minded, rather important-looking man. He was apparently addressing a large popular audience. ‘
Real
Christianity,’ he said again with emphasis.

‘Look Roland! A porpoise!’ said a woman of thirty to her offspring, in the tone of one anxious to guide rather than dominate the child’s formative years.

Soon the bell sounded for first luncheon and the group of passengers round Carfax began to break up, some going below, others opening ill-made packages and trying to shield the contents from dispersal in the gusty wind. The gulls, which would have followed the boat round the world were she aiming that far, drew nearer and flew more urgently over the deck. Carfax recalled that fragment of the great and beautiful Sappho according to which the souls of the dead become white gulls in slow flight before a high cliff in the bright sun. He recalled how he had walked one sunny day along Freshwater Down and thought his own soul took flight and drifted warm and lazy and for ever. Wandering along those white and removed cliffs, he had remembered Wagner’s inscription on a copy of the Pastoral Symphony presented to Baron von Keudell: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise.’

His drifting thoughts returned to the gulls shrieking and bickering above him: fierce and free and white and light and doomed. ‘The pathetic fallacy!’ he thought. He was seated facing directly astern, with his back against the cabinwork. ‘Sentimentality!’ He squirmed in his seat and his eyes settled upon his shoes, their high polish discoloured by Liverpool weather.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ enquired a voice.

A woman had risen from the seat round the corner of the cabin, where before he had distantly observed her reading,
and was standing before him. The book was held upside down in
her hand. Carfax recognised it as a volume in the
Collected
Translations
of
Voltaire.

‘I’m feeling hungry,’ she remarked in a tone so matter-of-fact and commonplace that Carfax ever afterwards wondered whether she had indeed uttered the earlier surprising question: also whether he himself had indeed spoken his thought aloud. ‘Could you possibly remember me till I come back?’ She removed a stout oilskin coat, placing it on her seat. She was wearing a jacket and trousers, and a simple white shirt. Her head was bare and the fingers holding the book were long and white.

‘I shan’t forget you,’ said Carfax, not quite certain whether the situation required him to rise to his feet. Moreover, was not the other’s tone a little peremptory?

‘Thank you for your memory.’

She disappeared.

Men are divided into those who know they find women too attractive for their peace of mind or happiness to be long continued; and those who know they would be happier if
only they could come to some sort of terms with the intransigent and rather trivial opposite sex. Carfax, who, upon medical advice, was virtually in flight, came, it will be gathered, into the former category. Finished with women, almost with the world (for he had very nearly decided to resign his position at the Foreign Office), and afflicted for several months now with a loss of appetite so complete and protracted that he was beginning to fear it would be permanent, he reflected with weary bitterness upon his folly and weakness as, ignoring his promise about the seat, he descended the steps to the ship’s dining saloon.

She was seated at a long table by herself in the half-filled saloon. Grease-spotted stewards sidled rapidly up and down with small portions of half-cold mutton. She had removed her jacket and her smooth light hair lay upon the shoulders of her close-fitting shirt, giving
an effect
at once remote and elegant.

She greeted the entrance of Carfax and his request to be
allowed to join her without the slightest feeling for or against becoming apparent to him. Neither felt impelled to admit cognisance of the several quite empty tables near them; but their conversation throughout the meal was more desultory and broken by longer, more unstrained pauses than is usual between strangers. They consumed a bottle of claret and, when coffee came, were quiet and smiling. She produced some Turkish cigarettes in a rather large gold case.

‘Do you know the Island very well?’ enquired Carfax.

‘Better than anybody,’ she replied unemphatically.

‘I wonder if you could recommend a good hotel? I am told there are no visitors at this time of year so that one can get
in anywhere. I thought I’d have a look round before settling where to stay, but perhaps you could advise me?’

‘Advice is always dangerous.’

Propelled by the steady breeze of agreeable impulse, Carfax became confidential, as a man does upon his first luncheon with a woman who pleases him.

‘I have been very ill.’ The breeze of impulse slackened suddenly: then resumed. ‘I have been ordered a long holiday. My doctor suggested the Island.’

‘That’s what comes of living too long among strangers.’ He looked up. But her concern seemed real. ‘If you’ve been ill I think you’d really better come and stay at Fleet.’ Then after a pause too brief for Carfax to reply, she continued: ‘The weather on the Island’s irresponsible at this time
of the year and there’s nothing whatever you can do about it. If you’ve been ill you won’t want to spend all your time in a hotel lounge. You’d become neurotic – like the rest.’

Carfax winced.

‘So stay with me instead. Fleet is a big house and you’ll never see me if you don’t want to.’

Carfax’s thoughts were racing, and his spine muscles were stiff and painful. Normally a man of second, third, and fourth thoughts, he, like all habitual vacillators, varied vacillation with occasional gross precipitancy. When decision is required, reflection avails only a few.

He accepted quietly and gratefully.

He paid the bill and they ascended. She drew on her heavy oilskin coat again and they went forward. As they neared the Island, she stood beside him in the bows of the boat, naming to him the mountains, the castles, the steep-sided narrow creeks, the mansions of the great and rich gleaming like palaces of glass in
the now bright sun. Round the Island the water was clear and deep, she said; the air clean and strong. She stood there like a pre-Homeric goddess, or Greta Garbo in
Anna
Christie
; her oilskin glistening, her hair streaming, her eyes shining, her voice soft but unfailingly distinct: unforgettable. Grief in Carfax began unobserved to shrink and slumber.

Upon the quay, among the mail vans and relatives and few loitering holidaymakers, an expensive car awaited them, attended by a plain but efficient young woman in chauffeur’s uniform, who drove like the wind but with the reliability which can only come from a vocation for the work. As they sped through the streets of the capital and beneath the park walls of the mansions encircling it, Carfax felt himself succumbing to the rapture of swift but secure motion. Suddenly, in a minute or two at the most, like great doors opening, his mind relaxed. He became aware of himself for the first time in many months or years. He lost himself and entrancing happiness chilled him like the creeping bursting dawn.

‘Do you recall Johnson’s definition of happiness? “Driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman alongside.”’

‘Johnson was afraid. Like all mortals.’

‘Are you never afraid?’

‘Oh yes.’ She sighed. ‘I am not immortal.’

‘Are you quite sure you’re not?’ She looked at him. ‘Immortals have no names, or names that no man or woman may utter. Have you a name?’

‘I have three names, but you may not utter them. You will hate them all. They are hideous commonplace names of schoolgirls and young brides, and elderly lonely pensioners, and pure women in books. Godparents’ names. Goodly names. Useful names which people in shops can
spell. I will not tell you what they are. But I will write them down for you.’ She opened the volume of Voltaire and beneath the legend
FINIS
wrote her names on the tailpiece.

The car had been ascending a mountain road, swift as a motor race. Her pencil tailed off down the page as they bumped over the uneven surface. It dropped to the floor. A strong invisible wind poured through the right-hand window as the car reached the ridge. It ruffled Carfax’s hair as he stooped to recover her pencil.