Of Time and the River (145 page)

And for ever he walked the street, under the brown and fatal light that fell upon him. He walked the street, and looked for a house there that was his own, for a door he knew that he must enter, for someone who was waiting for him in the house, and for the merciful dark wall and door that would hide and shelter him from the immense and naked eye of shame that peered upon him constantly. For ever he walked the street and searched the bleak, untelling façades for the house he knew and had forgotten; for ever he prowled along before the endless and unchanging façades of the street, and he never found it, and at length he became aware of a vast sibilant whispering, of an immense conspiracy of subdued and obscene laughter, and of the mockery of a thousand evil eyes that peered in silence from these bleak façades, and that he could never find or see; and for ever he walked the streets alone and heard the immense and secret whisperings and laughter, and was bathed in the bottomless depths of a wordless shame, and could never find the house he had lost, the door he had forgotten.

He was sitting in Marseilles, at a table on the terrace of a café on La Canebičre, when he saw them. Suddenly, above the rapid and vociferous animation of the café crowd, he heard Starwick’s strangely timbred voice, and turning, saw them seated at a table not a dozen feet away. Starwick had just turned to Elinor and was saying something quietly, in his tone of grave yet casual seriousness that often introduced his drolleries, and then he could see Starwick’s ruddy face suffuse and deepen with his laughter, and Elinor’s heavy shoulders begin to tremble, and then heard her shriek of high, astounded, and protesting merriment. Ann was seated listening, dark, silent, sullenly intent, with one long, slender hand resting upon the neck of the big dog who crouched quietly beside her, and suddenly her dark and sullen face was lighted by its rare and radiant smile that gave her features the instant configuration of noble beauty.

The world rocked before him as if shattered by the force of an explosion: all the life seemed to have been blown out of him, and he sat there staring at them, blind, numb, hollow, emptied to a shell, and conscious of only one sensation—a kind of horrible fear that they would turn and see him, a kind of horrible fear that they would not. They did not turn or notice him: completely absorbed in one another, it seemed to him that they had forgotten him as completely as if they had never known him, and he was suddenly stabbed with a horrible chagrin at sight of their free gaiety, a bitter anguish of despair because of the triumph of their laughter. Then he was conscious of a single, blind and overpowering desire— to get away from them, to get away unseen, to get away somewhere— anywhere—so long as he could escape the agony of meeting, the naked shame of revelation. He signalled to a waiter, paid his bill, and quickly made his way out among the tables into the noisy crowd that thronged for ever past upon the pavement. He set his face blindly away from them and plunged ahead: it seemed to him that he could hear Starwick’s shout of recognition, his voice calling to him above the thousand mixed vociferations of the crowd— and like a man pursued by devils, he set his head down blindly and fled.

His life had passed into a state which, if not insane, was distinguished from insanity chiefly by a kind of quiescent understanding which surveyed the passage of time and his own actions with the powerless detachment of a spectator in a dream. Now, after this encounter with his three lost friends, even this sense of valuation was taken from him. In the weeks that followed he was caught in a spell of time in which his life passed in a kind of evil dream, and later he was no more able to recall what he had done, how he had lived, where he had gone during this period, than if he had been the subject of a powerful and complete hypnosis. He was only vaguely conscious of what had happened, he felt a numb sense of horrible catastrophe, such as a drowning man might feel, or an anćsthetized patient who is bleeding to death under the surgeon’s knife. He had a blind consciousness that some central governance of his life and reason had been exploded, that he was spinning down out of control like a shattered aeroplane—and that there was nothing he could do to save himself, that he could not get control again, that he could not “get back.”

He lost the time-sense utterly—and it was his consciousness of this that filled him with numb terror. He would return to his room at night telling himself that he must work, then sleep, then rise by day and work again, and suddenly his room would be filled with light, the street below his window would be loud with all the noisy business of noon, and he would be seated at his table, with no knowledge how the time had passed.

He was now haunted constantly by a sense of the overwhelming nearness of his three lost friends. This feeling, indeed, would become so overpowering that at times the living presences of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann seemed invisibly to be with him, beside him. And the knowledge that they were here—for his conviction had become the obsession of an unshakable belief—seemed to give to the strange and sinister life of the evil and mysterious city an unutterable magic, to infect the very air he breathed with an intolerable anguish and delight. His whole life—heart and mind and spirit, and every nerve and sense and sinew of his body—was now passionately, indefatigably on the search for them. If he slept, it only brought to him an unbelievable ecstasy, an unbearable pain.

When he went out into the streets now it was only with the thought that he would find them—with an overwhelming conviction of his impending meeting with them. It seemed to him that every step he took was bringing him nearer to them, that he would meet them face to face around every corner that he turned—and this knowledge palsied his flesh with excitement, joy, and terror.

The two priests had finished eating, and provided with small cups of black coffee and small glasses of green Chartreuse, they had settled back against the wall to enjoy in relaxed comfort the peace that passeth understanding. Both of the priests were Franciscans, they were on their way to Rome for the Holy Year, and apparently they had come well bestowed. Beside their table a frosty silver bucket, over the rim of which floated the gold necks of two empty champagne bottles, gave evidence of a meal from which nothing had been lacking. A waiter brought a box of Coronas and offered them prayerfully. The priests selected their cigars with an appeased and drowsy air: they bit the ends and grunted slightly at the flame the waiter offered them; then collapsing slowly against the cushioned wall, they meditated the ceiling in silence for several minutes through a blue, fragrant mist of dreamful ease.

It was a fine evening towards the end of May, and the two priests were in the best place to observe it. They had the first table on the right as you entered the café, and at this season of the year there was no door: the front was open. Just outside, the priests could see all the gaily painted little chairs and tables of the terrace, which was empty, and just beyond, the sidewalk and the Avenue de la Victoire, the chief thoroughfare of Nice. The street itself was quiet: from time to time a motor car flashed past or an old nag with clopping hooves, pulling a dilapidated-looking victoria and urged on by a driver hunting for a fare. The trees along the street were in their full green leaf now and the air was sweet with the smell of the trees, the fragrance of earth and gardens and of unknown flowers. From time to time people came by with the strolling movement which a fine evening of this sort always seems to induce; and sometimes there would be young couples, lovers with arms around each other’s waists, the women walking with a movement of voluptuous and languorous appeasement as if they were just coming from the act of love. But probably all they felt was the sensuous mystery, beauty and fragrance of the night, the smell of the trees and the earth and the flowers, which seemed to impregnate the whole continent of dark with the thrilling promises of desire almost made palpable, of unknown joys about to be realized.

It was a wonderfully seductive scene that opened from the entrance of the café, and all the more exciting because of its homely familiarity, its small framed limits into which life passed briefly with a ring of jaunting hooves, a sudden casual nearness and loudness of passing voices, and then—the fading and lonely recession of these homely sounds, a woman’s burst of low and sensual laughter in the dark, the far-off dying-out of jaunting hooves—and silence.

The two priests missed nothing of the quiet scene: they drank it in with the air of men who have eaten nobly and who, fumed to contentment with the drugs of good tobacco and an old liqueur, are enormously pleased with life.

They were a strangely sorted pair and, once seen, would never be forgotten. The larger of the two was a huge tub and belly of a man, a kind of mammoth creature out of Rabelais, whose great moon of face flared fiercely, from the excess of his eating and his drinking. His fat neck and triple chin exuded over the neck-band of his robe, so that the garment he wore seemed to be stained and larded with the man’s own grease. Everything about the great priest cried out with swingeing openness: his whole nature seemed to be permeated by a good humour so mountainously all-engulfing that nothing in the world could stop it: the huge red face would swell, suffuse, and purple with its choking laughter, the whole huge torso—the shoulders, arms and breast, and the great heaving belly—would shake and tremble like a hogshead full of jelly. And so far was he from being troubled by a thought of judgment, by fear of censure or the world’s reproving eye, that the sight of a shocked or unconceding face was enough to send him off in a renewed paroxysm of volcanic mirth. There was no concealment in the man, there was even a kind of mountainously good-natured contempt for what the world might say or think of him, and for this reason his association with his fellow-priest was all the more grotesquely humorous—a humour which was certainly not lost on this great modern Friar John of the Funnels, but which he relished to the full. For, by contrast to this great flaring, heaving, roaring, full moon of a man, it would be impossible to imagine a more cautious and hypocritical figure than the other priest cut. The second priest was a little man with a grey, bleak, meagre and incredibly sly kind of face in which his native caution and fear of self-exposure were constantly waging a grotesque and open warfare with the sly, cunning, avaricious greed and sensual desire obscenely legible in his countenance. At the present moment this tormented struggle between lust and caution was comically evident: the fellow’s face was a grotesque painting of desire, and his furtive little eyes kept darting around in his head like rodents’ and he peered slyly right and left all round the café to see if anyone had noticed the naked exposure of his passions. The reason for his confusion, the very sight of which set his huge companion off in great breast-and belly-heavings of tremendous laughter, was not hard to find: at the table next to the two priests were seated two comely young prostitutes, who had ogled and enticed the two holy men all through the evening and whose seductive cajoleries, encouraged by the great priest’s explosions of mountainous belly- gushing laughter, had now become naked, open, and outrageous. The little fellow was in a cold, grey sweat of fear and longing: afraid to look at the two women, he could yet hardly keep his eyes off them; and terrified lest his conduct be observed and followed, he was nevertheless unable to conceal the feverish eagerness of desire which held him fascinated in a kind of trance.

So the indecent comedy proceeded: the two women, emboldened by the huge priest’s mountainous heavings of laughter, passed swiftly from flirtatious raillery to proposals of a more serious character: at the end, something certain, swift and serious passed between the women and the huge fat priest: one of them spoke to him in a low hoarse tone, he lowered his great moon of face a trifle, and without looking at her, answered. In a moment the two girls rose with an elaborate casualness, the priest paid their bill, and the women sauntered out, turned left, moved slowly towards the corner and, crossing to the other side, advanced a few yards down the quiet intersecting street, where they paused and turned, waiting, in the obscuring shadow of a tree.

In a moment the huge priest called for the bill, paid it, tipped the waiter generously, and rising with a mountainous grunt, deliberately launched his huge bulk towards the street, closely followed by the sly and terror-stricken figure of the little priest. Outside the café the great priest paused deliberately, looking both ways with a kind of huge and rotund benevolence; then turning left in the direction the girls had gone, he set out again in leisurely, unperturbed pursuit. And the little priest trotted along beside him like a frightened puppy beside an elephant; in every step, in every stride and movement that they made, the separate characters of the two men were grotesquely and powerfully evident. The huge priest barged along with a tremendous and deliberate majesty, swinging his great belly right and left before him as an elephant swings its trunk, and magnificently indifferent to what anyone might think or say. But the little man trotted along in a state bordering on terror; he tried desperately to look casual and unconcerned, but his shifting eyes darted furtive glances right and left, and beneath the hem of his rough gown his sandalled feet kept slatting up and down in a movement that was somehow comically sly and that revealed the man’s whole character. At the corner the big priest paused deliberately again, turned, surveyed the scene and then, espying the white of the girls’ dresses below the trees across the street, set out in deliberate pursuit. And the little priest trotted along beside, his head lowered, his eyes darting furtive glances right and left, his sandalled feet slatting slyly up and down. Then they caught up with the girls below the trees and, half obscured in darkness, they stood for a moment talking in low voices. Then each of the girls took one of the priests by the arm and they all walked off together down the street and soon were lost in leafy darkness and the mystery of the night. Then the waiter, who had served the priests and who, standing in the entrance, had observed the meeting across the street, turned and, glaring at the youth, said quietly: