The Ultimate Egoist (37 page)

The drumming, heartlike, devastating, was so intense that we could all but see it, and the moaning died away only to grow again into a great shuddering scream—something tangible, something to fear. We fell back before it as if it were a blast of heat, and I for one knew that I had reached the limit of my endurance. Stumbling, falling, cursing, I ran forward to the fire-room hatch, groped along the bulkhead until I caught the cable that controlled the whistle. I caught it and pulled, and it bit deeply into my hands, but I did not care. The sounds rose together; that awful, mysterious mouthing from the fog, and the friendly hissing gurgle of the ship’s whistle clearing its brazen throat. The sound we knew and the one we feared battled for supremacy in the vibrant mist.

The ship shook from stem to stern as live steam burst through the whistle vents, and with a shattering roar gave tongue to our fear and our defiance. And as the cable slipped upward through my bleeding fingers and the whistle stilled, the frightful ululation from the fog dwindled and fell to nothing, and the drums ceased and the crew—cheered.

I staggered to the rail and peered out there. Daylight was coming and, as I watched, the curtain began to lift. The ship heeled slightly, partly from the press of the dawn wind, partly—yes, I could see it now—partly from the wash thrown up by some vessel that must have run close under our counter. And now I could see her—and though it was funny now, I was too weak to laugh. She was Turkish—
Turkish!
On her stern floated the white star and crescent on a red field, and on her bridge was an old type, cracked, crank-turned foghorn, and on her well deck was a great drum. It’s written there in your
Rules of the Road at Sea
, if you’ll look; a Turkish vessel under way uses a
drum
for a fog signal!

We had been frightened, then, of nothing. But fear is enough in itself. Sailors are an odd, impressionable lot!

A
T HER INSISTENCE
we rode together, though I knew what was to happen. She was very beautiful—more beautiful than Iris, though it was Iris I loved. Her name was Niobe, and her hair was such a great and glorious mass that when the light was from above, her strong face was in shadow. Her hair was dark as the color of embers is dark compared with flame, and a countrywoman was once heard to mumble that Niobe carried her soul in her hair. I was Harald then, and I believed that Niobe had no soul. And I believe it now.

We rode out on the moors, the foothills of Carn Englyn, in “Little-England-Beyond-Wales.” I came with her, for she was armed and I was not. I stayed by her, for she rode as well as I and could shoot better than any man. I was not afraid, for fear is an emotion based on hope—hope of escape; and there was no hope in me. I did not speak except at the end of the ride, and then only briefly. But she talked as we travelled, in her voice like somber music, and she reveled in her coolth and hatred of me.

“I grew up alone,” she murmured, “All alone but for my own world, which is dead these three centuries, and but for you. As Harald the poet you came to me from the moors, wild as the hairy gorse and filled with laughter that unnerved me. I mistrusted your unplanned thoughts and sudden movements, and I despised you because you were something I could not understand.”

She was silent for a time, and the heather whispered to our horses’ hoofs. She was a strange creature, Niobe. She regarded the world and its folk and its modern sun and sky and dwellings and atmospheres as dreams she dreamed by daylight. I do believe that the crest of the Pembrokes was engraved on her unearthly heart. Easily it might be, for her thoughts were of the Pembrokes and her books and her dress and her ways were those of the Pembrokes. And her
loves, all but her one great love. Ah, could I be blamed for that? … Her mind was born three hundred years ago, as the mind of Mary Sidney, sister of Sir Philip and dowager Countess of Pembroke. Her brother was a poet, and at his death the seventeenth century countess turned to poetry and—poets. Spenser knew, and told of her. What became of the mind of Mary Sidney, none know; but I know that after three hundred years Mary Sidney was Niobe Pembroke. Yes, I know that.

“You were a fool who danced in the sun and dared to love a degraded world, while I stood in dark places about the manse and watched you. You dared to love the trees about you, and the smell of heath-born wind. I stood apart and saw you, and heard you chant your poetry in strange keys, and I hated and despised you. I found your scrawlings on tattered papers about the house and grounds, and I saved them and wept over them secretly. You dared to love and let me stay alone. You dared to love,” Niobe coldly crooned, “to love Iris. Unseen I saw you with her, and I read and heard your songs after she came. Your songs were finely written and possessed of delicacy and laughter, those qualities I hate.”

Niobe’s eyes were ice-green or they were gray. Like Northern Lights they were, that change while you watch, so that you see that they are perceptibly different without having seen the change. Her eyes touched me gently, as gently as her strong hand touched her weapon, and I knew it would be soon now.

“Oh, you were obedient,” she said. “I ordered you to stay by me, and you did. I ordered you to speak to me, to read to me, and you did. I despised you for it. You spoke well, you read well, when I put words on your lips or a book in your hands. But when I asked you to speak to me from your mind and heart, you stuttered and stammered like a peat-digger, saving your ready word-magic for your pen and for—Iris. You could parrot my words and the words of the poets while I was by you, but otherwise my presence struck you impatiently dumb. I hate you for making me a traitor to myself, by tempting me away from my life in the past to the degenerated life of the so-called present. I hate you for choosing an inferior woman to me—to
me!
But most of all I hate you for making me envy her—she who
is but a dust-mote whirling in the waning sunlight of an unreal world.”

I still said nothing, for I knew Niobe and I knew of hate, and therefore I knew the power of Niobe’s hate. I gazed at the craggy shoulder of Carn Englyn, rearing up out of Pembrokeshire, and I thought of Iris. Iris was a slender thing, and swayed with the wind like a stalk of golden wheat. The wind of my laughter and of my passion brought laughing and passionate response in Iris. I loved Iris. I gazed for a moment at Niobe, staid and inscrutable. I might have loved Niobe, I thought, watching a sunbeam trying to escape the ordered depth of her hair. But a man with a body and a soul cannot love a woman who is gifted with utter and eternal composure. Even now, as she spoke of her love and her torture and her hate, there was no passion in it. None, none at all, even when she met my eyes and gripped them with her own and whispered,

“I killed Iris this morning, Harald.”

I stopped my horse and slid off its back and leaned on the warm withers, looking again deep into Niobe’s eyes. No passion there—great God, there was not even satisfaction! At last I spoke:

“I have made you suffer, Niobe. I have taken your pride from you. I know what you will do now, Niobe, and when you have done it you may reflect that you have done exactly what I want you to do, and have given me what I most desire. Kill me now, Niobe.”

My horse reared and fled at the sound of the shots; hers stood still and trembled, for it feared her, as did all living things. She put a bullet into each of my eyes and one in my heart, and rode away. I lay there with my torn dead eyes staring at a gush of blood dripping slowly from a heather-blossom.

After the flesh was quite cold I was no longer Harald, and so I rose from it and drifted away toward the manse and Niobe. It was dark then, and cold; but then I knew it would be cold. The moor was lovely as I saw it now, without light.

I floated to the manse and puffed through the window of Niobe’s great chamber. Niobe sat before her mirror, and her hair was down, pouring, cascading down to pile up lightly on itself beneath her chair. Never a woman had such hair … She sat with her chin in her hands,
and she was trying to smile at herself and could not. I settled over her like a pall and my voice cried deep in her brain, “To the tomb, Niobe!”

She did not start, and for a full minute did not move. Then she turned slowly and looked behind her. One eyebrow lifted—her one concession to facial mobility—and slowly she turned back to the mirror. I let her watch herself for a moment and then spoke to her mind again.

“Dress, Niobe, and go to the tomb!”

Niobe rose and dressed.

It was a long way to the tomb, and all that way Niobe’s face was still and her heart beat slowly and evenly. I was with her—she carried me!—and I knew she was frightened. She knew where the tomb was, but she had never been there. I knew why. It was the one Pembroke property which she shunned—and oh, I knew why!

A wind wailed about the tomb, and it spoke to Niobe in Harald’s voice.

“To the tomb, Niobe!” Like a somnambulist she approached it, and her cloak streamed behind her and whipped upward and then close to her, and the wind plucked at her hair and smothered the cloak. “Read, Niobe.”

She screamed suddenly, again and again, but none heard. The scream left her lips as laughter—Harald’s gay, triumphant laughter, as it was when he first kissed Iris. And over and above it shouted the wind—“Read, Niobe! Read, Niobe!”

I was an aura, a steady and directionless light about her, and as she leaned closer to the stone, fighting the wind, fighting me, fighting herself, the light grew bright and the weathered words leapt out to her.

“Read, Niobe!”
cried the wind, cried Harald, cried the aura about Niobe, cried—Niobe herself.

She read it, then, the epitaph she dreaded. Her voice was clear and carried well over the wind; she was shaken beyond trembling; she had known fear and had plumbed the depths even beyond fear, as had Harald on the moor. The old, stilted verses were lovely from her lips:

Niobe was a woman, in spite of all, and the laudatory phrases elated her; enough, at least, so that she rose from utter hopelessness to the level of fear again, and stopped.

“Read on!” wailed the wind and I, and laughed gustily. “The prophecy! Read on, Niobe!”

Faltering at first, then with increasing clarity, she read—

And with a wild shriek of laughter
—my
laughter—Niobe fulfilled the prophecy.

And I love Niobe now. A man with a body and with a soul might not, but I may. We are almost happy together, as, riding the chill wind, I wail about the tomb …

[
Note:
This, the tomb of Mary, Countess of Pembroke, who died in 1621, still exists, epitaph (by William Browne) and all. About the monument, the “mourner and her tomb,” one cannot be so certain! All other facts authenticated.]

“M
AKE WAY FOR
the mahout!” bellowed the crew’s messman. Everybody stood up but me. I’d never seen anything like this on a ship before. I watched the door. A spindly little Cajun shuffled in, looked around at the solemn crew, giggled, blushed, went to his seat. Everyone sat down with him, went on as if nothing had happened.

“Now what the devil kind of high jinx might that be?” I asked Wacky Robinson. Wacky and I had shipped together before, on another ship. This was my first trip, first day out, first meal on this tub.

Wacky washed down an improbable amount of rice and gravy with an impossible amount of iced tea. “That,” he said, using the hair on his wrist as a napkin, “is Jacques the Giant Killer. That’s Luchaire, the 4 to 8 fireman. That high jinx? Ah, we’re kidding him. That is … well, maybe it’s kidding. He—he rates it.”

“Him? That swamp runner? Don’t look to me as if he could even punch carbon.”

Wacky laughed. “That’s what Muggsy thought.”

“Muggsy? You don’t mean—”

“Yeah, I mean. All 240 pounds of Muggsy Trent, the terror of Proctor, the muscle of Mobile, the horror of Houston, the Galveston Gorilla, the—”

“O.K., O.K., Wacky,” I said. Wacky could keep this up for two trips; I knew him. “So what’s that got to do with the scrawny little crawfish?”

“Le’me tell you. Just listen at this.” Wacky lit a Denobill to frighten away the mosquitoes, and leaned back against the bulkhead. “Muggsy was quartergasket on here, couple of trips back. You know Muggsy. Six foot two, more muscle than brains. Big enough so he didn’t need brains. Nice guy, if you keep out of his way when he’s feeling good and leave him alone when he ain’t.

“One night a bunch of us is playin’ knock rummy here in the messroom. Muggsy is sitting over there and the Cajun is perched on the other table back of him, kibitzing. Minding his own business, mouth shut. One hand, Muggsy gets three queens, three 9s, an’ a 4. He knocks right away; if no one can count less than four, he gets two bits from each man. Everyone is caught cold but the first assistant; he grins an’ turns up as nice a rummy as you ever saw, 2 to 8 in clubs. Which means Muggsy has to fork over four bits.

“No one ever saw Muggsy lose an’ grin yet. He turns purple, looks around him and sees Luchaire behind him. ‘Jinx!’ he roars, and hauls off and lets the little guy have a terrific backhand. Luchaire takes off like a flying fish and I’ll never forget the noise his head makes when it hits this bulkhead here. Muggsy would have jumped on him again but the first assistant catches his arm and says, ‘Your deal, Muggsy.’ Muggsy cools off a little and everybody sits down again, except for a couple who carry the Cajun out.

“Five minutes later he is back. He is considerably messed up. But he is the maddest little guy I ever saw. ‘Moggsy,’ he says, ‘you treat me like a rat, no? So. I am a rat now. I keel you like a rat. You mus’ sleep sometime, no?’ An’ he beat it. Funny; that breaks up the game when the other thing don’t.