Unknown (10 page)

They prayed to this unknown Ultimate, out of their hollow boat, above that gleaming current, so simultaneously and so intensely, that the magnetism of their prayer shot like a meteorite out of the earth's planetary atmosphere. Something about its double origin, and something about the swift and translucent water from which it started on its flight, drove it forward beyond the whole astronomical world, and beyond the darkness enclosing that world, till it reached the primal Cause of all life.

What happens when such a wild-goose, heart-furious arrow of human wanting touches that portion of the First Cause's awareness that encircles the atmospheric circumference of the earth? So many other organisms throughout the stellar constellations and throughout the higher dimensions are unceasingly crying out to this Primordial Power, that it can obviously only offer to the supplications of our planet a limited portion of its magnetic receptivity. And again, as all earth dwellers discover only too quickly, it Itself is divided against Itself in those ultimate regions of primal causation. Its primordial goodness warring forever against its primordial evil holds life up only by vast excess of energy and by oceans of lavish waste. Even though the cry of a particular creature may reach the First Cause, there is always a danger of its being intercepted by the evil will of this vast Janus-faced Force. Down through the abysses of ether, away from the central nucleus of this dualistic Being, descend through the darkness that is beyond the world two parallel streams of magnetic force, one good and one evil; and it is these undulating streams of vibration, resembling infinite spider webs blown about upon an eternal wind, that bring luck or ill luck to the creature praying. The best time for any human being to pray to the First Cause if he wants his prayers to have a prosperous issue is one or other of the Two Twilfghts; either the twilight preceding the dawn or the twilight following the sunset. Human prayers that are offered up at noon are often intercepted by the Sun—for all creative powers are jealous of one another—and those that are offered up at midnight are liable to be waylaid by the Moon in her seasons or by the spirit of some thwarting planet. It is a natural fact that these Two Twilights are propitious to psychic intercourse with the First Cause while other hours are malignant and baleful. It is also a natural fact, known to very few, that many of the prayers offered to the First Cause by living organisms in their desperation are answered by less powerful but much more pitiful divinities. Priests of our race, wise in the art of prayer, are wont to advise us to pray to these lesser powers rather than to the First Cause; and they are wise in this advice. For whereas the evil in the First Cause is only partially overcome by the good, in some of these “little gods” there is hardly any evil at all. They are all compact of magical pity and vibrant tenderness. It happened by ill luck on this particular occasion that the prayer to their Creator offered up by John Crow and by Mary Crow in their open boat on the Wissey in Norfolk aroused a response not in the good will of this ultimate Personality, but in Its evil will. Neither John nor Mary was aware that if a human being prays at noonday or at midnight it is better to pray to the Sun or the Moon rather than to the First Cause. Chance led them to pray on this occasion almost exactly at twelve o'clock; and although their prayer reached its destination unintercepted by any other power, it lost itself, not in the ultimate good, but in the ultimate evil. ...

Was it a dim intimation of this that led John to redouble his furious strokes as he rowed their boat down the Wissey? The sweat began to pour down his face as he tugged at those long oars and his mouth, open now and twisted awry, began to resemble the fixed contorted lineaments of an antique tragic mask.

Mary was divided in her mind whether to call to him to stop or to let him alone until he stopped of his own accord. Assisted by wind and tide as well as propelled by his desperate efforts, the boat shot forward now with an incredible speed. The girl had grown by this time more skilful with the rudder lines. John, in the tension of his rowing, kept more even time than he had done before.- Thus, though their speed was much greater, they seemed to avoid the beds of reeds at the river curves, and the shallows opposite the deeper pools, and the floating masses of cut weeds that they overtook, with much greater facility, than when they were casually drifting.

“I'll make him stop in a minute!” she kept saying to herself; and then something in the very effort they both were making, he to row and she to steer, something almost religious in their united tension, compelled her to concentrate upon what she was doing and to hold her peace. Past deep, muddy estuaries the boat shot forward, where the marigolds grew so thick as to resemble heaps of scattered gold, flung out for largesse from some royal barge, past groups of tall lombardy poplars, their proud tops bowing gently away from the wind, past long-maned and long-tailed horses who rushed to look at them as they shot by, their liquid eyes filled with entranced curiosity, past little farmhouses with great, sloping red roofs, past massive cattle-sheds tiled with those large, curved, brick tiles so characteristic of East Anglia, past sunlit gaps in majestic woods through whose clearings tall, flint church towers could be seen in the far distance, past huge black windmills, their great arms glittering in the sun as they turned, grinding white flour for the people of Norfolk, past all these the boat darted forward, rowed, it seemed, by one relentless will-power and steered by another. And as he swung his arms forth and back, repealing his monotonous strokes with grim pantings and with a glazed, unseeing look in his eyes, it seemed to John as if merely by making this blind quixotic effort he was on the way to insure a happy issue for their love.

He had prayed to the First Cause and the superstitious idea took possession of him that the longer he kept up this struggle the more likely he was to get a favourable answer.

He was indeed a good deal more exhausted already than his coxswain had any notion of. If she had not been compelled to concentrate her attention on rounding the river curves she would have marked how pale his lips were growing; but she too was wrought up to a queer hypnosis of blind tension. Every now and then she would cry out, “Right, John!” or “Left, quick! Left! I tell you,” but apart from these brusque words she remained as silent as he.

One effect this nervous madness had. It united them as nothing else could have done. The longer this tension lasted the closer these two beings drew together. Casual amorists have indeed no notion of the world-deep sensuality of united physical labour. More than anything else this can give to a man and a girl a mysterious unity. Nothing in their sweetest and most vicious love-making had brought these two nearer to becoming one flesh than did this ecstatic toil.

It may be that a blind instinct had already warned them that their prayer to the Living God had only stirred up the remorseless malice in that Creator-Destroyer's heart. Whether this wen so or not, it is certain now that some obscure and lonely fury in them turned upon that tremendous First Cause, and deliberately and recklessly defied it! The two of them were alone on that Norfolk river, a man and a woman, with the same grandmother and the same grandfather, with the same grandparents in a steady line, going back to Agincourt and Crecy, going back to all the yeomen of England, to all the sturdy wenches of England, to all the John Crows and Mary Crows that fill so many churchyards in the Isle of Ely unto this day.

The silver-scaled dace and red-finned roach that their swift movement disturbed seemed actually to pursue this furiously speeding boat. The quivering poplars seemed to bow down their proud tops to watch these two; the cattle lifted their heads to gaze at them as they swept by; beneath air-region after air-region of tremulous lark-music they flashed and glittered forward; water-rats fled into their mud-burrows or plopped with a gurgling, sucking sound under the swirling eddies that their boat made; moor-hens flapped across their way with weak, harsh cries; small, greenish-coloured, immature pike, motionless like drowned sticks in the sunny shallows, shot blindly into the middle of the river and were lost in the weeds. The prolonged struggle of these two with the boat and with the water became in a very intimate sense their marriage day upon earth. By his salt-tasting sweat and by her wrought-up passion of guiding, these two “run-down adventurers” plighted their troth for the rest of their days. They plighted it in defiance of the whole universe and of whatever was beyond the universe; and they were aware of no idealisation of each other. They clung to each other with a grim* vicious, indignant resolve to enjoy a sensuality of oneness; a sensuality of unity snatched out of the drifting flood of space and ¦ time; It was not directed to anything beyond itself, this desire of theirs. It was innocent of any idea of offspring. It was an "absolute, fortified and consecrated by the furious efforts they were making, by the diamond-bright sparkles upon the broken water, by the sullen clicking of the rowlocks.

John had begun to count now. “I'll stop after twenty more strokes,'! he thought. But when the last of the twenty came, and he found in the beating pulse of his exhaustion an undreamed-of nerve of renewal, he did not stop. The dazzling spouts of water drops which followed his oars, each time he drew them from the water, mingled now with a renewed counting. 'Ten . . . eleven . . . twelve . . . thirteen . . . fourteen . . . fifteen . . .” Those rhythmic, up-flung splashes of dancing crystal, stirred and subsiding amid the long emerald-green weeds, became the thudding reverberation of his own unconquerable heartbeats. These again became triumphant figures of victory, of victory over nature, over custom, over fate. “Sixteen . . . seventeen . . . eighteen . . . nine------”

He never reached his second twenty. Disturbed by the appearance of a living javelin of blue fire, flung forth from a muddy ditch, darting, like a gigantic dragon-fly, down the surface of the river in front of them and vanishing round a bend of the bank, Mary gave a startled pull to her left rudder string; and the prow of the boat, veering in midstream, shot with a queer sound, like a sound of snarling and sobbing, straight into the overhung mouth of the weedy estuary, out of which the kingfisher had flown!

John fell forward over his own knees with a groan. His shoulders heaved silently under his heavy sob-drawn breathing. He was lost to everything except the necessity of finding free and unimpeded breath.

Mary sat quietly on where she was. “I'll go to him in a minute,” she thought. “Better let him get his breath first.” She could not see his face. She could see nothing but his head and his knees. But she knew, without seeing it, that his face was quite hideously contorted. She noticed that something wet was falling down from his face upon the plank under his feet. She peered forward and stared morbidly into the darkness at his feet. Was blood dripping from his mouth? “Dear God!” she cried in her heart, “Have I killed him by my foolishness?” The cry was followed by such a wave of love for him that she could hardly bear it and remain passive any longer. She wanted to throw her arms r,ound him and press his head against her thin chest. This feeling was followed by another one of an egoistic tightness and self-pity. “It would be just like my fate,” she thought, “just like the way everything has happened to me all my life, if he has consumption and this has given him a hemorrhage.”

She remained rigid, her heart beating, holding herself in by an effort of the will. At last his breath became quieter. For a few seconds after that, his head seemed to sink helplessly down. It looked almost as if it would touch the plank between his knees. The oars, still clutched tight in his hands, stood up at a grotesque angle. “Are you all right, John?” she whispered at last. . He did lift his head at that and smiled at her, drawing a deep sigh. “Ex-hausted,” he murmured. “I was a fool to go on so long.”

“Lean back a bit in the boat,” she said. He tried to obey her and she got up on her feet and crossing over to him took the oars from the rowlocks and laid them side by side. As she did this she thought to herself: “John and I are one now. Nothing in, those hateful Ruins will be able to divide us now.” * She helped him to lie down on his back in the prow of the boat with his arms extended along its sides and with his head against the acute angle of its wooden bow. “Give me the flask, my sweet!” he murmured.

His overcoat was in the stern and she had to move once more down the whole length of the boat to get it. As he watched her doing this a most delicious languor rippled through him like a warm tide. Something weak and clinging in his nature derived a special satisfaction at that moment from being tended by this girl. “She is what I've waited for all my days.”

After he'd drunk the whiskey Mary began to wonder whether she ought to suggest their having their lunch here in this kingfisher ditch. She was secretly very averse to doing so. In her mind's eye, all that morning, she had pictured herself spreading out a Virgilian repast on mossy grass and under great trees for herself and her lover. Anyway it would be much nicer to leave this ill-smelling boat for a time and stretch their legs on the land.

“I'm going to explore the neighbourhood,” she said at last, getting up upon the seat where he had been rowing, and seizing a willow branch wherewith to pull the side of the boat nearer the bank. In the" glow and relaxation which he enjoyed just then her figure, standing there above him in the flickering shade of the branch she held, gathered to itself that sort of romance which of all things had always stirred him most. Both sun and shadow lay across her brown hair, parted in the middle and drawn back to a rough, simple knot, and upon her plain dress, and upon her sturdy peasant-girl ankles.

“Very good, you beautiful creature!” he murmured. “You might give me a cigarette out of my greatcoat before you go. I'm too comfortable to move.”

She jumped down with alacrity, gave him cigarettes and matches, and then stepping lightly for a second on the side of the boat sprang to the bank. “You won't go to sleep and let it drift out, will you? It's fast in the mud; but you don't think I ought to tie it to the tree?”