Read Island Magic Page 29


  “Where are we going?” asked Ranulph.

  “To L’Autel beach,” said Peronelle, surprised.

  “Are we?” said Ranulph. “Colour seems crowding in on us to such an extent that it seems to me we are walking right through it to the other side.”

  “What is it like on the other side of colour?” asked Peronelle politely.

  “Quite white,” said Ranulph.

  “My stars!” said Colin, “has anybody got matches? We’ll want to light a fire to roast the limpets.”

  The agitated and finally successful searching of Ranulph’s pockets turned the attention of everyone but Michelle away from Ranulph’s curious remarks. Only Michelle, as she trailed disagreeably in the others’ wake, wondered what he meant by saying that whiteness is on the other side of colour.

  They came down the last lane on to a flat white road winding across a stretch of common, and in front of them was the sea. This side of the Island was so entirely different from the Bon Repos side that it seemed a different country. Here there were no cliffs. Stretches of sand and grass, seal holly and feathery fennel, ran level with the beach. Little low whitewashed cottages edged the road, their gardens full of veronica and tamarisk trees, and low rocks of rose-pink granite ran out into a sea of an intense blue. Nowhere else round the Island was the sea quite so blue as it was at L’Autel beach. Ranulph stopped, caught his breath and stared. Until to-day he had been too lazy to come to L’Autel. He had forgotten its magic. He had forgotten that any sea, anywhere in the world, could be so blue. He remembered now that L’Autel beach, though perhaps not so grandly beautiful as the rocky coast at Bon Repos, with its chasms and precipices and caverns, had an unearthly beauty that had about it the quality of a dream. One was always afraid it might suddenly melt away. Its colours, except for that vivid sea, were the pale colours of the rainbow, and seemed as fragile. The soft yellow green of the tamarisk trees, the blue-green of the sea holly, the pearly white of the cottages, the mauve of the veronica, the pale pink of the rocks echoed in summer by the diaphanous pink of the tamarisk flowers, all these were the colours of enchantment. Only that brilliant slash of blue, encircling them, seemed to keep them from fading away beyond human sight.

  “I tell you what it is,” said Ranulph, “if that sea were not there, keeping L’Autel in the curve of a rainbow, keeping it visible colour, it would dissolve into thin air and let one through to the other side. It’s tranquillity, that’s what it is; tranquillity and acceptance.”

  Only Michelle heard what he said. The others had gone racing down to the beach. Michelle was far too bad tempered to bother at the moment, but she saved up his remark for future reference.

  They set to work collecting limpets, all except Peronelle who couldn’t really take to this limpet roasting custom. In spite of repeated assurances to the contrary she was always so dreadfully afraid that perhaps the limpets didn’t like it.

  “They don’t feel a thing, you idiot,” Colin assured her, “do they, Uncle Ranulph?”

  “A limpet,” said Ranulph, struggling with one, “is nothing but jellified obstinacy.”

  “Well, anyhow, I’ll collect the stuff for the fire,” said Peronelle, and removed herself.

  The limpets, when collected, were laid shell uppermost on a flat rock and covered with dry sticks and furze. This was set on fire, and a glorious sheet of flame covered the rock and made a savage note of colour against the pale greens and pinks of L’Autel. Michelle turned her back, but the others danced round the fire, Colin every now and then leaping over it. They had seen the peasants doing this round the bonfires lit on the first Sunday in Lent, “le Dimanche des Brandons.” These fire dances had, Ranulph knew, their origin in a heathen cult driven underground centuries ago. Watching the growing absorption of the children and their almost trance-like movements he suddenly got up and stopped them. . . . They did not know what they were doing. . . . It seemed to him that with their dancing something evil stirred for a moment in the heart of L’Autel, something it was better to let alone.

  When the flames had died down to glowing ash, and the limpets were done to a turn, Peronelle unpacked the bread and butter, the hard-boiled eggs and the milk, and they settled down to an immense meal. Ranulph, watching limpet after limpet disappearing down the throats of Michelle, Jacqueline and Colin—Peronelle somehow couldn’t fancy them—marvelled at the digestive powers of children. If only this cast iron interior could be preserved through life there would, Ranulph thought, be much less crime in the world.

  When everything that could be eaten had been eaten Colin took off Peronelle and Jacqueline to play a game known as “murder and assassination,” a very noisy game which entailed a great deal of screaming and rushing over the rocks.

  “Come too, ’Chelle,” pleaded Peronelle, but Michelle wouldn’t budge, she stayed sitting beside Ranulph looking very white and staring out to sea. The wind was rising steadily and white horses were rollicking in at their feet.

  “By this time to-morrow,” said Ranulph, “it’ll be blowing great guns.”

  “Mm,” said Michelle, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “By all means,” said Ranulph pleasantly, “come back to me when you’ve finished.”

  When she came back, cold and miserable and crosser than ever, he had put a little tin cup in the embers and was warming milk in it. He gave her the milk, wrapped his coat round her and took her to sit in a sheltered cranny of the rocks. Here in the sun, with Ranulph’s coat round her and a solid wall of rose-pink granite between her and the wind, Michelle began to feel warm and comforted.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Ranulph politely, lighting his pipe, “it was inevitable. Exaltation followed by temper followed by limpets was bound to end in physical distress.” He cocked his eye at her, “I hope the stomachic disturbance has eased the spiritual one?”

  Michelle smiled. The crossness was beginning to ooze out of her. She felt weak and tired, and very peaceful.

  “If you mean am I less cross,” she said, “well, yes, I am. It’s funny, but I feel quite seraphic now.”

  “Be careful,” warned Ranulph, “that is a particular stage of deep fatigue and is followed, as the fatigue grows less, by a condition of extreme irritability equally trying to the sufferer and his friends.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Michelle.

  “I don’t know. I once had some small experience as a doctor but not as a psychologist—though the latter study has always interested me enormously.”

  “What is it exactly?”

  Ranulph felt her curiosity was a healthy sign of mental recovery and smiled at her encouragingly.

  “Psychology? The study of the mind. Put more simply a psychologist employs himself by finding out where people are being fools and why.”

  “Does it interest you to see where people are being fools, Uncle Ranulph?”

  “Enormously,” said Ranulph. “I like to get human beings under the microscope. I like the feeling of Olympian detachment which it gives me, and it is a delight to find that, idiotic as I am myself, others are frequently more so.”

  Michelle, interested, sat up and cupped her chin in her hands. Her eyes, so dull all the morning, began to look alive again.

  “Are we all idiots?” she asked.

  “We are all quite, quite mad,” said Ranulph solemnly, “some of us more so and some of us less so. The more so get shut up, the others, unfortunately, do not. It’s just a question of degree.”

  “It’s a pity, isn’t it?” said Michelle.

  “What can you expect? In most people you have the soul and body constantly at war with one another and the mind refereeing them and getting battered in the process. Is it any wonder if the poor thing gets permanently warped?”

  Michelle heaved a great sigh. Ranulph, glancing at her, realized he had put a finger on her pr
oblem.

  “One lives in two worlds,” she said slowly, hesitatingly.

  “Exactly,” Ranulph encouraged.

  “And when the—the—everyday world comes in on top of the other and shuts it out one gets in a frightful temper—at least I do.”

  “Very disturbing for all concerned,” murmured Ranulph.

  “Yes, but what can one do about it?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “But you understand things. . . . How did you know I’d been—what you called exalted this morning?”

  “The extreme violence of your reaction led me to infer that there had been something to react from.”

  “What can I do about it?” she pleaded, “I can’t go through life getting in tempers and making other people miserable and I can’t, can’t, give up that other world—the world of the little white town.”

  “What little white town?”

  “It’s built of white marble—by the seaside. ‘And, little town, thy streets for evermore will silent be—’ ”

  Ranulph smiled. “Oh, that one? Yes, it would be a pity to give that up.”

  He puffed out smoke thoughtfully. Then he looked at her, twinkling. How desperately earnest she was over the old problem, so old that it was almost stale.

  “The problem,” he said, “is one of unity. The two worlds must be linked together and you yourself, your spirit, must be linked to what is behind all this—” he circled his pipe stem towards the sea and the rocks and the tamarisk trees—“to the whiteness behind colour.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said impatiently, “but how, how? It’s all very well to talk like that, but one never seems to get any farther.”

  “Most of us don’t. We just talk. But one in a thousand does.”

  “Yes?” She was almost panting in her eagerness, and again he looked at her with amusement.

  “I once met a man who said he had. He was a German—they are apt to be mystical, something to do with eating sausage and pickled cabbage.”

  Michelle snorted. “I don’t want to know what he ate, I want to know what he said.”

  “Ah, but you needn’t snort. The two are very intimately connected. What you eat has a very great effect upon what you feel, just as what you feel can very often affect what you eat—or have eaten—as you’ve just experienced.”

  Tears of vexation stood in Michelle’s eyes. Ranulph, penitent, composed his features, knocked out his pipe, and started again.

  “He said—the German—and he hadn’t eaten anything for hours but dates—we were travelling through the desert together—that in the process of unity there are three stages. First, you have your vision of reality—spirit—call it what you will—we’ll call it your little white town, the thing that you want to be one with—which comes to you invariably, though few seemed to realize it, through your body and the unfortunate despised everyday world.”

  “Oh?” said Michelle, startled, “but one seems to fight against the other.”

  “Only because we make them fight. Our minds, the poor battered referees, are usually so stupid that they set one against the other instead of reconciling them. . . . Give the poor material world a chance. . . . Would you ever have seen your little white town if the man Keats had not written about it with, probably, a battered quill pen on the back of an unpaid bill, and if a rackety printing press had not bound his words into a book, and if the book had not come across from England to this Island in a filthy steamer so that your bodily eyes—give the poor body a chance—could scan the printed page and give a vision to your soul?”

  “Oh—yes—” said Michelle.

  “Stupid, weren’t you? Well, now we’ve seen the necessity of one world to another we’ve more or less linked them together in a friendly way and we can go on to my German’s second stage of unity—the stage where you always come a cropper.”

  “Well, go on.” Ranulph was getting just a little bored and Michelle had to prod him.

  “My German said it was a stage of tranquillity and acceptance. Having realized the necessity of everyday life to vision you then proceeded, instead of getting into a temper with it, to accept it with tranquillity and let it break down barriers in you—those barriers which separate your spirit from the spirit behind and in all created things, that Thing that you want to be one with.”

  “Keats’ orbed drop of light,” said Michelle. “But how can one let everyday life break down barriers?”

  But Ranulph, though anxious to help her, was now getting really bored—morality always bored him. He had failed so utterly in that direction himself and one’s personal failure, he thought, is always extremely boring. But he blew smoke patiently through his nose and continued.

  “My German said it was a case of taking each event of life as a piece of discipline, as an opportunity for exercising courage, purity, or whatever virtue seemed to you most unpleasant and stupid at the moment. In that way, he said, you could get rid of all the sin and what-not that clog you up like a lot of fat. In that way, so he said, each trivial event in life acted like the blow of hammer and chisel in the carving of a statue—it knocked away extraneous matter and let free the form of the thing, the spirit of it. Once your spirit is, so to speak, freed, it can link itself with spirit immanent and transcendant.”

  “Then goodness is the thing that frees a spirit,” said Michelle primly. Her tone was so like Miss Billing’s that Ranulph nearly yelled.

  “Don’t mention the word good to me,” he exploded, “it’s a vile word. It’s not the right word at all. It—it—stinks of Victorian hypocrisy and top hats, and flannel petticoats, it—” He stopped, fuming.

  “What is the right word then?” said Michelle crossly. Not so did Miss Billing receive her pious remarks.

  “There is no word. How can there be in these days when virtue is the fashion and crawling worms of human beings, posturing as eagles, take all the eagle words, apply them to themselves and smother them in mud?” He snorted. “In any case, what word is there to describe a chiselled, liberated human spirit? It’s as impossible to describe as the charioteer of Delphi.”

  “What’s he like?” asked Michelle.

  “Like?” Ranulph snorted again and waved his pipe. “Like? He’s a statue—you’ll see him one day. He’s the victor in a terrific struggle. . . . And now it’s over. . . . He’s simply standing there, very upright, very tranquil, and with that ease that’s the reverse of indolence. And the dignity of his simplicity is amazing. . . . He’s come through something that has left him stripped of everything that doesn’t matter. . . . And now he’s waiting for his laurel wreath.”

  There was a silence.

  “You haven’t talked about your German’s third stage,” said Michelle at last. Ranulph seemed soothed by the thought of his charioteer and she felt it was possible to question him again.

  “The laurel wreath. . . . The consummation of unity. . . . The whiteness behind colour. . . . How do you expect me to talk about it when I know nothing of it? Even my German, who did, could find no words. . . . They never can. You can describe the symbols or visions with which in your first stage of union the Thing you desired seemed clothed, but when it comes to union with the Thing itself you are dumb—so said my German. You’d better go and see the charioteer of Delphi, he can tell you about it—but he uses no words.”

  Ranulph got up abruptly. His face had become grim and a little bad tempered again. Michelle felt rather frightened of him. What had she done?

  “You didn’t mind telling me all that?” she asked timidly.

  “Mind?” said Ranulph crossly, “of course I minded. Do you think it’s pleasant to describe a delectable country at second hand?” He began to walk savagely across the beach, Michelle running after, trying to catch the flying fragments of talk that he dropped behind him.

  “Why are we born blind as kittens and deaf as adders? . . . Fools! . . . Only one l
ife and that spent in running in the wrong direction, blind and deaf. . . . And the thing is written in the visible world and shouts in invisible sound. . . . Fools! . . . And the devil’s own torture that at last one sees clearly from outside the gate.”

  Michelle, scared, couldn’t think what on earth he was talking about, but she felt she had disturbed him horribly. She was sorry, but at the same time tingling with the things he had said . . . gloriously tingling. When she’d had time to sort them out she felt she really would at last get somewhere.

  Ranulph stopped where the path to the little village of L’Autel led from the beach across the grass and the sea holly. “It’s cold,” he snapped, “time to be getting home.” He yelled like a braying donkey for the others, still murdering and assassinating round and round the rocks. Michelle, puffing and blowing, came up with him. They stood together looking round at L’Autel, at its pale pinks and green and pearly whites whipped by the rising wind.

  “Now I know what you were thinking of as we came down,” said Michelle triumphantly, “you were thinking of your German.”

  Ranulph, though still inclined to growl, smiled a little and began to shoot out disjointed sentences again. “Stage one, the lanes; vivid colour, irresistible beauty luring you on. . . . Stage two, L’Autel; pale rainbow colours. Tranquillity and acceptance born of storm. . . . Stage three. Unity. Merged colour. Just the whiteness of light. . . . Good luck to your hunting, Michelle.”

  IV

  So strangely are destinies intertwined that one human being, standing merely as a link between one soul and another, changes the whole current of a life. That unknown German gentleman, who had years before expounded his philosophy to a bored Ranulph in the heat of a desert march, reaching out through another gave an impetus to Michelle’s life that carried it far. Often in later years she wondered how far she would have got along her road if it had not been for that windy, lovely Good Friday. The days slip by, one after another, uncounted beads, but now and then comes one, rounded like other days with dawn and sunset, yet bright with the significance of a lamp set at a crossroads. This Good Friday was so illumined not only for Michelle but for André too, for one Charles Blenkinsop, an elderly English publisher with asthma, was able that day, through Ranulph, to remake André’s life.